> My role as part of Storage will be to consider “what does data access and storage look like in this world?” If your code is moved to the edge, but your data is still in a central server, you don’t gain the full benefit of having the code close to the client. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this space!
Fixing this problem, or at least coming up with the plan to fix it, is now literally my job :) (There is of course already a plan in motion, given that Workers KV exists today...)
Yes, until we have actual edge storage, the use cases are more limited, but "edge functions" can be used for:
* Stateless / static use cases.
* Optimizing use of edge cache.
* Intelligently redirecting traffic to geographically-diverse back-ends -- including other cloud services that are already globally distributed.
For example on the last point: If you want to use Google Spanner as your database but you need to put business logic on top of it, then where does that business logic go? If it goes in a VM, either you have to make sure to replicate that VM all over the world (can be cumbersome and/or expensive) or you've lost Spanner's advantage of being globally distributed. You could put your logic at the edge, and then it will usually sit between the user and the nearest Spanner node to that user, which is ideal.