Re:So, you want to deploy on the edge?
by firebirdn99 on Monday July 31, 2023 @12:25PM
(#36945022)
They're all data centers in essence; some are way smaller, less functional and some way bigger. But still much smaller than regional DC's (the cloud). Akamai has smaller ones, and hence 1000's of them. While Cloudflare and Fastly have larger PoP(Points of Presence) and a few 100's of them.
I think this is a network architecture detail, and is using the term "edge" in a subtly different sense than the article is. We have "edge" hosts and "worker" hosts where I work, but "edge" means "the edge of our network, where requests from the Internet land", not "deployed as close as possible to users".
Cloudflare and Akamai both have the concept of edge workers - light weight application APIs that can serve modest capacity. Cloudflare also has a cache on the edge.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-workers/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/how-the-c...