Introduction

The edge of the cloud is likely the single most underrated layer of cloud-native systems. However, as I have previously mentioned, my first cloud-native wow moment was when I realized I could run a single-page application (SPA) presentation layer from the edge without the complexity, risk, and cost of running an elastic load balancer and multiple EC2 instances. Furthermore, leveraging the edge brings global scale to certain aspects of cloud-native systems without expending additional effort on multi-regional deployments. Our end users enjoy reduced latency, while we reduce the load on the internals of our system, reduce cost, and increase security. The recipes in this chapter cover a multitude of ways we can leverage the edge of the cloud to advance the quality of our cloud-native system, with minimum effort.