Running compute and caching close to users, at CDN points of presence, instead of only at the origin region.
Edge computing pushes compute and data caching close to end users, at CDN points of presence (Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda@Edge, Fastly Compute@Edge, Akamai EdgeWorkers) rather than only in centralized regions. Use cases include request authentication, A/B routing, response transformation, geofencing, and short-TTL personalization. The point is to shave 50-300ms off requests that can be served without round-tripping to origin.
Latency at the edge is dramatically lower than at the origin region for users in the wrong continent, an Australian user hitting a us-east-1 service waits 200ms for a TLS handshake before the request even starts. Edge compute lets you handle auth, caching, and simple personalization at the user's nearest POP, then call origin only when needed.
See the part of the platform that handles edge computing in production.