Practical articles on AI, DevOps, Cloud, Linux, and infrastructure engineering.
The edge is fast because it's constrained. This is the decision map for what belongs at the edge, what belongs at origin, and how compute, data, caching, and auth fit together.
Edge functions run everywhere and remember nothing. Durable Objects give you one addressable, single-threaded instance with transactional storage — the missing source of truth.
Edge runtimes look like Node but aren't. Here's what actually breaks — CPU caps, no filesystem, no TCP sockets — and how we route around it.
We moved 40 TB of user media off S3 and cut the bill by 70 percent, mostly by killing egress fees. Here's where R2 won and where we kept S3 anyway.
Both put SQLite near your users, but they solve replication and write latency very differently. We ran the same schema on both for a month and picked one.
We moved a rewrite-heavy request path off Lambda@Edge to Workers and cut p95 from 340ms to 41ms. Here's when that swap pays off and when it doesn't.
The cache-control header most teams under-use. How stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error turned our CDN from a freshness liability into a latency and resilience win — with the gotchas.
Edge compute is useless without an edge data layer. Three serverless databases that put data within ms of your edge functions, with the tradeoffs that aren't on the marketing pages.
