Edge computing: when it actually makes your app faster
NEO Campus Editorial27 March 20266 min read
The edge marketing pitch is universal speed. The reality is more nuanced: the edge wins for specific workloads and loses for others.
Latency wins
Static assets, HTML responses, redirects, A/B tests, and personalization at the HTML layer. Anything that avoids a round trip to the origin.
Latency losses
Workloads that need a database in another region. The edge function is fast; the network hop to the DB is not.
Data-local edge
Distributed databases, edge KV stores, and replicated read replicas are changing the maths. The architecture is finally catching up to the marketing.
