Serverless at the Edge with Kenton Varda

Over the last decade, computation and storage have moved from on-premise hardware into the cloud data center. Instead of having large servers “on-premise,” companies started to outsource their server workloads to cloud service providers.

At the same time, there has been a proliferation of devices at the “edge.” The most common edge device is your smartphone, but there are many other smart devices that are growing in number–drones, smart cars, Nest thermostats, smart refrigerators, IoT sensors, and next generation centrifuges. Each of these devices contains computational hardware.

Another class of edge devices is the edge server. Edge servers are used to facilitate faster response times than your core application. For example, Software Engineering Daily uses a content delivery network for audio files. These audio files are distributed throughout the world on edge servers. The core application logic of Software Engineering Daily runs on a WordPress site, and that WordPress application is distributed too far fewer servers than our audio files.

“Cloud computing” and “edge computing” both refer to computers that can serve requests. The “edge” is commonly used to refer to devices that are closer to the user–so they will deliver faster responses. The “cloud” refers to big, bulky servers that can do heavy duty processing workloads–such as training machine learning models or issuing a large distributed MapReduce query.

As the volume of computation and data increases, we look for better ways to utilize our resources, and we are realizing that the devices at the edge are underutilized.

In today’s episode, Kenton Varda explains how and why to deploy application logic to the edge. He works at Cloudflare on a project called Cloudflare Workers, which is a way to deploy JavaScript to edge servers, such as the hundreds of data centers around the world that are used by Cloudflare for caching.

Kenton was previously on the show to discuss protocol buffers, a project he led while he was at Google. To find that episode, and many other episodes about serverless, download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS or Android. These apps have all 650 of our episodes in a searchable format–we have recommendations, categories, related links, and discussions around the episodes. It’s all free and also open source–if you are interested in getting involved in our open source community, we have lots of people working on the project and we do our best to be friendly and inviting to new people coming in looking for their first open source project. You can find that project at Github.com/softwareengineeringdaily.

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