Near Edge Serverless

Near edge serverless, is the kind of edge computing that is located near the data center. Originally, “near edge” was called “Content Distribution Network (CDN)” because its original purpose was to accelerate the delivery of media like images and videos by caching copies of the media between the data center and the user’s home network.

Recently, CDN providers like Fastly and CloudFlare have provided developers with the ability to run small bits of code packaged as serverless apps. Cloudflare workers are a considerably restricted form of serverless app. Written only in JavaScript, restricted to only a small set of libraries, and highly constrained in resource usage, CloudFlare Workers are intended to be able to do minimal processing on HTTP-based traffic (such as munging HTTP headers). However, clever developers have been able to use them for more, such as server-side rendering (SSR) of JavaScript apps.

As generic forms of compute become more popular, “on the edge,” the definition of near edge is getting less defined. It can be a little controversial, as detractors point out that there is nothing unique about near edge computing compared to traditional clouds, other than perhaps location. Near edge does indeed run inside of data centers. The objective, though, is to run many small data centers instead of a few large ones. Because of this ambiguity, though, providers may say “edge” or “near edge” when all they mean is “not in one of the big clouds.”