The Future of the Web is Peddling Endless Amounts of Cloud Frameworks
The number of web sites that need global edge computing is vanishingly small. More realistically you need a 20+ year old technology called a CDN to run your mostly static site.
Edge computing doesn't even solve any of your real problems here. I18n, l10n, international taxation/currency/payments, data-at-rest/GDPR/privacy laws. And then it introduces new problems, such as data partitioning. Are you going to partition at the edge and deal with tricky sync issues (CAP, anyone??) or are you just going to call back to your centralized DB server a thousand miles away from that edge? You know what's even faster than running that code on an edge device? Running that code on the user's phone or laptop. And you can get there. With a CDN.
You say that until you travel somewhere in Eastern Europe, South America, or Southeast Asia, and realize that 90% of the Western Internet is completely and utterly broken. Everything besides Google, Facebook, etc. (Because they’ve invested in solving the problem) are practically unusable.
The problem isn’t just TTFB or latency, as some people are implying, it’s poor interconnectivity at the transit provider level. Those links are frequently congested and experience fiber cuts, and unless you’re peered in that country your application is going to perform poorly. The companies who understand this have a first mover advantage in some of the fastest growing economies in the world.
The number of web sites that need global edge computing is vanishingly small. More realistically you need a 20+ year old technology called a CDN to run your mostly static site.
Edge computing doesn't even solve any of your real problems here. I18n, l10n, international taxation/currency/payments, data-at-rest/GDPR/privacy laws. And then it introduces new problems, such as data partitioning. Are you going to partition at the edge and deal with tricky sync issues (CAP, anyone??) or are you just going to call back to your centralized DB server a thousand miles away from that edge? You know what's even faster than running that code on an edge device? Running that code on the user's phone or laptop. And you can get there. With a CDN.