
Containers and Virtual Machines at the Edge - Elof
https://blog.stackpath.com/introducing-containers-and-virtual-machines-at-the-edge
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Animats
Not really the "edge". Just a data center nearer the user, like Akamai.

Is it worth the hassle? All you're saving is latency in the backbone between
the point of presence and your home data center. Does this beat directing
requests to the nearest AWS region? As long as you're in roughly the right
hemisphere and time zone, you're probably close enough.

~~~
spben
Edge can be defined as many things, and is currently being defined by the
world in many ways.

At StackPath our definition of Edge is basically being as close as possible to
the eyeballs aka users. Think of it as the front door to the internet.

Today our Edge expands across major IX's around the world and that's just the
beginning. 5G is approaching us quickly along with container data centers.

The way we built our orchestration system it can deploy and manage workloads
anywhere. In the future, that will include 5G container data centers which
gets workloads even closer to things like self-driving cars, smart cities, IoT
devices, <insert your idea here>.

~~~
Animats
_" workloads even closer to things like self-driving cars, smart cities, IoT
devices"_

Oh, please. If you really need those last few milliseconds of lag reduced, you
need local computation. If you don't, an AWS datacenter on the same continent
is probably good enough.

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luhn
Given my experiences with Stackpath's CDN, I wouldn't trust them with any sort
of workload. They bill themselves as the "secure" CDN, yet were not validating
SSL certs on the origin.

~~~
spben
Sorry to hear about this experience, would love to know more as we take
security very serious.

Our CDN certainly will validate SSL certificates at the origin if the setting
is enabled.

With that said, you may be on a legacy CDN product often referred to as
"Secure CDN" and that setting may differ from our current CDN offering.

I'd be more than happy to loop our CDN team in to clarify. Feel free to reach
out directly to product at stackpath.com and I'll get it setup :)

------
judge2020
For contrast: why containers are a poor choice for small, function-based
workloads on the edge: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-
containe...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containers/)

~~~
spben
Ben from the StackPath product team here. We agree containers or VM's may not
always be the best available option for a workload. That's why we also offer
an equivalent product to the one by Cloudflare (great product btw) -
[https://www.stackpath.com/services/edgeengine/](https://www.stackpath.com/services/edgeengine/)

However, it should be made clear that our container and VM solution is not a
"function" type offering. You can deploy a container and/or VM workload on our
Edge similar to what you might find at Cloud providers. The main difference is
we sit a layer above the cloud providers and make deploying worldwide simple,
secure, and fast.

With a few clicks or a single API call you can deploy a micro-service all over
the world (even add an anycast IP if you need one) in under 60 seconds.

~~~
bithavoc
What cloud provider is under the hood?

~~~
spben
None, it's StackPath under the hood. We have over 65Tbps of capacity all self
built/managed at the major IX's in the world.

With a lot of our experience coming from the original founding team at
Softlayer, we've built an incredible Platform.

More information on our network can be found at
[https://www.stackpath.com/platform/network/](https://www.stackpath.com/platform/network/)

~~~
dberg
Are you guys running Knative or similar to handle the serverless workloads in
your edge ?

~~~
spben
We are not. Knative is a great project and something we're definitely looking
into for more "function" type workload offerings down the road.

Today our container/vm solution does not have a warmup concept other than the
initial deployment of your container. You simply specify your image, some
attributes, and it's deployed to the locations specified on our Edge. Once
deployed, you have the ability to delete the workload at any time, but it's
not elastic based on requests to the workload.

~~~
dberg
Cool, so what's your container/vm orchestration layer then?

