Hacker News Reader

Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: can someone describe to me or point me to a blog post about what 'edge' computing can do? I am having a hard time understanding what the difference is between it and 'normal' cloud infra where end-clients call to a central cloud service. In other words, what is the architectural difference between Snapchat, where many end devices have a thick-client connection to a central service, and 'edge' computing?

View on HN

There's really 2 things that you get. The first is that by having servers close to clients you can minimize latency, and you get scalability for free. The big architectural difference is that generally read/write databases become extremely challenging so you either have to get into some crazy CAP territory OR you architect around essentially event sourcing/logging. It works great for some applications, terrible for others.

You request static assets from a CDN and your request hits a "lambda" function on the edge. It inspects your user agent and decides to send you mobile-optimized assets.

It's largely about latencies. Doing certain request(and response!) processing closer to the client, along with potential data locality benefits, you can get responses back faster and more efficiently.

You can have better latency to more local edge server than distant cloud server.

If your clients are really thin on resources you can use edge server for rendering, converting your client-side rendering back to server-side. More usecases on https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com