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Comment by myoffe | Hacker News Reader

I don't fully get it. What does the "edge" here means? How is it like a CDN? How is this different than Heroku/GCloud?

We're still learning how to best describe this.

Edge is a bit of a marketing term, we all might end up using something else to describe this down the road. Edge normally means "servers that are very close to your users".

CDNs are specialized edges for caching HTTP content. Edge Apps are a lower level concept than CDNs, but you can picture the same thing. We have servers all over the world, we distribute your code to them, your users connect to whichever is closest to them.

Heroku, and most of gcloud, are location specific. You deploy code, it runs in Ashburn Virginia, your users traverse the internet to connect to your apps (which adds latency).

Our Edge Apps are most likely to replace a CDN, not replace your app hosted on Heroku. Lots of our customers run centralized apps and then write JavaScript to enhance them by caching partials close to users, or optimizing content as it gets shipped to users.

I got most of the way through the page assuming it was something to do with Microsoft edge. Perhaps worth at least one line early on in the page to give a bit better idea what it is?

Edge, the term, is really popular in IIoT/5G space. It's now a continuum of services - Cloud, Fog/Edge, Mist, Dew. I agree that some of it is just marketing jargon but Fog/Edge as a concept is now well understood. References: (1) Open Fog Consortium (https://www.openfogconsortium.org/) (2) Edge Computing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_computing)

I don't know it. So others who might otherwise be interested might not know it as well. So it would be nice to provide a small hint. That should'nt be that hard. As a startup, you cannot afford arrogance, if you want to succeed.

Definitely not meant as arrogance. We'll make it clearer, it seems like there's a bit of that confusion here.

I was also convinced that it referred to Microsoft Edge applications, definitely worth a little explanation.

> Edge normally means "servers that are very close to your users".

In the circles I'm in, that's definitely not true. Purely anecdotal of course, but Edge definitely refers to a browser made by Microsoft around here.

I think it would make more sense to people who work on a CDN everyday.

This may sound like FUD but I'd strongly encourage people to stop spending too much time on edge or internet explorer. Just do the bare minimum and focus on Chrome/Firefox. It is better for everyone. I am very disappointed that Microsoft decided to bundle edge with Windows showing yet again they don't get it. Microsoft should be able to update edge separately of Windows. Without this, corporate users (pretty much the only reason to support ie/edge) will still be behind the curve for a long time.

Heroku runs your code on one set of colocated or near-located servers, usually behind a load balancer. There may be a database involved as well. You rent a VM for a certain amount of time and pay for that VM.

Fly Edge, Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda@Edge all take your code, deploy it atomically to 50+ datacenters located in almost every continent / developed-ish country, and run it in a "serverless" mode in response to HTTP requests on the closest edge to the request. They run your code in an on-demand container mesh that loads it up when there's actually a request for it, so you just pay for the total amount of time that your code runs.

Agreed. At first I thought it was something related to MS Edge. Even when I figured out it was something else and searched for both "edge apps" and "edge applications," all I found was MS Edge related links.

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