Edge Functions, Mental Model

The “servers closer to users” framing kept leading me astray, because it suggested edge functions were an infrastructure decision rather than a data decision. Once I reframed it as “move the logic to where the data lives” everything clicked faster.

If your function reads from a database in us-east-1, running it at the edge in Tokyo does not make it faster — it adds a network hop between the edge and your database. The edge is only a win when your data is distributed, or when your function can do its work purely from request context without hitting a central datastore.

The mental model that finally stuck for me: edge functions are not a deployment topology, they are a data-locality optimisation. You reach for them when you have a data problem, not when you have a latency problem. Once you internalise that distinction, a lot of platform docs read very differently.