5 exercises on edge computing — edge nodes, CDN edge functions, cold starts, edge runtime, and Cloudflare Workers.
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1 / 5
What is an edge node in the context of edge computing?
Edge node: by processing requests at a location near the user (e.g. 50 ms away instead of 200 ms to a central region), edge nodes reduce latency for reads, personalisation, auth checks, and A/B logic without a round trip to the origin.
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What is a CDN edge function?
CDN edge function: examples are Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, and Akamai EdgeWorkers. They execute at the PoP closest to the user, enabling request rewriting, header injection, A/B testing, and bot filtering in microseconds before the origin is reached.
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What is a cold start at the edge?
Cold start: traditional serverless (Lambda) can have cold starts of 100ms–1s. Edge runtimes (Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Edge) use V8 isolates that start in under 1ms because they share the V8 engine without spinning up a full OS process — eliminating meaningful cold starts.
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What is the edge runtime environment and what APIs are typically unavailable?
Edge runtime constraints: edge functions run in lightweight V8 isolates or WASM runtimes. They support Web Standard APIs (Request, Response, fetch, crypto.subtle, ReadableStream) but not Node.js core modules. Next.js's export const runtime = 'edge' opts a route into this environment.
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What distinguishes Cloudflare Workers from traditional serverless functions (e.g. AWS Lambda)?
Cloudflare Workers vs Lambda: Workers deploy globally to every Cloudflare PoP automatically, execute at the nearest location, and start instantly via isolates. Lambda is regional (you choose a region), uses heavier container-based isolation, and may experience cold starts on the first invocation.