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                                                                             :: :.

Edge Computing: Cheap and Scalable

Hosting web apps can be needlessly complicated. It's easier than ever to create a CRUD app to fill a simple need. Say a license check, a piece of software asking, "can I run?", "should I be updated?". Assuming this data is in a database, any programmer should be able to write the 10 lines of python to answer this question.

But where do you host it?

You could rent a virtual machine, a kubernetes cluster, a container as a service provider... All of these have their benefits and very real use cases. What they are not is simple or cheap.

Surprisingly, there exists tech that can be both, namely Cloudflare Workers. To crudely oversimplify what it does is, whenever your user makes a request to your worker, similarly to how their CDN works, Cloudflare just runs your code on the nearest server to the user.

Making this possible required a lot of work, ranging from workerd the JS/Web Assembly runtime to their impressive amount of Points of Presence.

Safe to say some effort was required so I can run my JavaScript app for $5.