Speed is no longer a luxury for businesses, it's a necessity. Whether shopping online, streaming content or using business apps, users expect instant and seamless experiences. Simultaneously, companies face increasing pressures to innovate, scale, and remain secure against ever-intelligent threats, all without breaking the bank.
As the internet and technology stacks evolve and grow increasingly complex, legacy IT infrastructures have struggled to keep up, resulting in poor user experience, security vulnerabilities and runaway spending. Many businesses are now turning to a modern edge architecture that seamlessly integrates in their stack and way of working, allowing for faster innovation, easier pivots and instant deployments. Here are four reasons why modern production systems need an edge architecture to match.
Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Fastly.
Being slow is unacceptable
Today’s audiences expect engaging and immersive content, and are more impatient than ever with low tolerance for low quality resolution. Viewers expect content to play instantly, every time.
Adding to the challenge of making your experiences instant every time, content is rarely consumed where it’s created, and geographical distances will introduce unavoidable latency. The more popular you are, the broader your geographical reach and the more global demand for instant playback.
Without a proper architectural strategy, a system broadcasting breaking news, viral content, or a game-winning moment in the United Kingdom will have Australian viewers waiting for data – an issue compounded by network congestion, routing inefficiencies, and the occasional ship’s anchor.
While the issue is as old as the Internet, edge computing solves the inherent delay using points of presence (POPs) placed strategically across the globe. At any given time, POPs can cache and deliver content from the server nearest the consumer, ensuring they receive content with the smallest possible delay. Latency is drastically reduced, page load times are accelerated, and consumers will experience improved performance for applications, streaming services, and websites.
Success shouldn’t break your budget
On the surface, using two or more hyperscaler zones as a way to build a geographically distributed application seems straightforward – and this is valuable for disaster recovery purposes. However, to do this in a way that simulates a true edge system with dozens of locations is not feasible when you consider cloud costs and engineering resources. Moreover, it distracts from your innovation efforts with your core business.
Modern distributed edge systems are more capable, flexible, and affordable than ever. They provide proven, robust performance with global coverage, enabling fast, personalized, and secure computing. Equipped to give developers the tools they need for instant scale and custom computing, these systems have evolved from traditional CDN use cases into highly customizable, API-friendly platforms that can integrate with a wide range of demanding applications. And you won’t need to spend tens of millions on physical infrastructure and operational talent to leverage them.
By using distributed datacenters, content owners and online businesses can optimize performance without extensive hyperscaler investments. Edge systems also help reduce cloud bandwidth costs by caching frequently accessed content closer to end users, minimizing egress traffic. This not only lowers operational expenses but also ensures an infrastructure that can deliver at scale when your business has the most successful days of its existence.
Your users require privacy and security
Users today are savvier than ever regarding their data privacy and security. With a new paradigm of regulatory requirements like GDPR, businesses must be prepared to simultaneously meet these requirements while also delivering the experience their customers expect within budget.
It is essential for companies that deal with sensitive data to leverage modern architectural design to separate public and private information without interrupting the user experience. One possible way to do this is to organize the data into separate API responses or services into static, cacheable data (financial market trends, news, product information) and personalized, non-cacheable data (account balances, user-specific notifications).
This way, public data can be cached while private data is kept secure and private. It also conforms to the trends in mobile app development, where API-first architectures naturally separate user-specific calls from general data. All of this is instantly configurable and programmable with a modern edge partner.
Beyond privacy expectations, for industries facing piracy threats and account takeover risks, edge computing systems offer distributed and high-performance countermeasures. A modern threat model requires a security portfolio that is intelligent, adaptable and cost-effective. An edge-based solution localizes enforcement so that platforms can detect and prevent unauthorized access in real-time. And since performance is optimized, users benefit.
Decoupling data, taking advantage of edge programmability, and incorporating dynamic caching mechanisms allow businesses to increase security, improve performance, and lighten the load on their infrastructure without affecting the user experience. Your architecture strategy should tightly integrate each of these perspectives.
Focus on reliability
Even if your site or applications are fast, within budget, and manage your user’s privacy and security perfectly, it’s all for nothing if your uptime flakes or your team is constantly paged out of bed to fight midnight incidents. Thankfully, the same edge strategies can give your business layers of resiliency through intelligent caching, layered origin protection, and instant system scalability.
Don’t let the biggest and most successful days for your business turn into catastrophes due to a lack of architectural planning and the wrong edge partner. Plan ahead and choose the most flexible, cost-effective, secure, and resilient partner to plan for your long-term success.
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