Edge computing (Workers)
Running code in data centers close to the user, on the CDN, instead of in one central region.
Platforms such as Cloudflare Workers run small functions in many locations, start in milliseconds and scale to zero. That suits routing, auth checks, redirects, APIs and rendering. The catch is data: code at the edge is fast only if the data it needs is also nearby or cached; a function in Warsaw querying a database in Virginia is still slow.
Related terms
- Durable Objects: Cloudflare’s single-instance objects with their own storage: one place in the world that owns a piece of state.
- Static site: A website served as ready-made files (HTML, CSS, images) with no server code or database running per visit.
- Rate limiting: Capping how many requests a user, key or IP can make in a time window, and answering HTTP 429 above it.
