We moved our first production site to the edge in 2023. Three years and a couple of dozen launches later, here is the honest ledger.
What it bought us
Time-to-first-byte that is genuinely flat across continents, and a deploy story that does not involve a region picker. For storefronts and marketing sites, that is most of the win.
What it didn't
Anything that talks to a database on every request still has to go back to where the database lives. The edge does not make round trips shorter; it makes caching decisions matter more.
Where we landed
Static and cached at the edge, personalised at the origin, and a lot less magic in between than the launch blog posts promised.