You don't need the edge to have the same abstractions for your application. It's commonly called the 12-factor app and there are many ways to achieve it
I’m not familiar with all the authors, but they also say they came to these conclusions while developing on Heroku/ developing the platform itself. One of the earliest & biggest players in the ‘edge’ software market.
Can you elaborate on why you said “you don’t need edge”, when these ideas were intuited by folks creating apps on the edge? Because the way I’m reading it. It seems that this is a methodology perfectly suited (if not designed) for the edge?
I tend to agree with the article, that edge is the ‘future’. It might not be next month, or next year. But 5 years from now? It certainly seems to be trending in that direction. And for good reason I think.
Don’t get me wrong, I love nerding out with an Ubuntu server, configuring everything, and making my app run on the internet by hand. But dang if it isn’t a lot of work. Most hobby projects I start nowadays, I start from a simple static site approach, keeping in mind I’ll need to progress to more complexity/layers as need be, and throw it up on Netlify or Cloudflare Pages. It’s so efficient, it’s hard for me to imagine starting off a personal project any other way now.
There have been many trends in software, some stay, some go, some evolve
Maybe you are conflating "edge" with "serverless" and over applying the latest buzzword? None of the technologies you have mentioned are "edge" and telecoms have been doing edge since before it had a buzzword.
It's all about deployment and running infra. The "edge" has a lot of complications, and while closer in spirit to the early internet, we gravitated towards centrally controlled compute because it is much easier to manage and maintain at scale. See other comments for why
I think it's fair to call Heroku (and 12factor apps) a pre-cursor to edge computing, but certainly not an early player.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201126133614/https://devcenter...