“I want control,” she said, opening her eyes. “Not like a king or anything. I just want to be able to control it, a little. My life. I don’t want to get shoved around, by people or by fate or whatever. I just… I want it to be me who chooses.” - Lift
Edgedancer aims to be an edge computing platform compatible with many CDNs.
It will provide a useful subset of CDN features, enabling multi-CDN architectures. This will improve reliability and eliminate vendor lock-in.
🤔 Idea 🤔
This project is currently in the "idea" phase.
We're following a documentation-driven development process. Any documentation you find is likely to be aspirational, incorrect, or straight up impossible to implement. Any implementation is purely a proof of concept.
Only a fool would rely on this code in production.
| Platform | Technology | Supported languages | Edge Storage | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS CloudFront Functions | "Process based isolation" | JavaScript | ❌ | Very strict execution time limits - less than 1ms max |
| AWS Lambda@Edge | Firecracker | Python, JavaScript | 🤷♂️ You can sort of hack stuff together using CloudFront's cache | Not really @ Edge - lambda functions run in regional data centres |
| Akamai EdgeWorkers | V8 Isolates | JavaScript | ✅ (EdgeKV) | |
| CloudFlare Workers | V8 Isolates | JavaScript | ✅ (Workers KV) | |
| Fastly (classic) | Varnish | VCL | ✅ (edge dictionaries) | |
| Fastly (compute@edge) | WASM / Lucet | Rust, AssemblyScript, JavaScript | ✅ (edge dictionaries) | |
| Fly | Firecracker | Any | ✅ (multi-region postgres) |
Got another edge computing platform you think we should include? Let us know by raising an issue.
| Platform | Support |
|---|---|
| AWS CloudFront Functions | 🤔 considering |
| AWS Lambda@Edge | 🤔 considering |
| Akamai EdgeWorkers | 🤔 considering |
| CloudFlare Workers | 🛠 in progress |
| Fastly (classic) | 🙅♀️ no plans |
| Fastly (compute@edge) | 🛠 in progress |
| Fly | 🤔 considering |
The most similar two platforms are CloudFlare Workers and Akamai EdgeWorkers - these are both built on V8 Isolates, they both support JavaScript, and they have similar key-value storage offerings.
However, Akamai's sign up form gives me bad vibes. It's too enterprise-y. So I don't want to use their product.
Also CloudFlare and Akamai's offerings are so similar that they don't make a particularly good proof of concept.
So instead, let's start with CloudFlare and Fastly. I use Fastly at work, so this will be a good opportunity for me to learn a bit about their Compute@Edge platform.
As a proof of concept, let's consider a simple website that:
- Has hundreds of thousands of pages
- Has (almost) the same header / footer on every page
- If the user has a cookie, tells them they're signed in
- Has a single big block of content in the middle which is different on every page, fetched from an origin
Our edge compute platforms should:
- Fetch the header / footer from edge storage
- Check the user's cookie and show them if they're signed in
- Fetch the main content from the origin
- Stitch the content together
- Serve a response