Edge computing?
Wondering what edge computing is? 🤔
If you've ever used a website you can understand it!
As you read through the pages in the Preview on the right, hover your mouse over the content to find elements you can click to see their source code in the files on the left.
To begin, let’s take a step back…
When I open a website in my browser, my device downloads the content and renders it in the page that I see and interact with.
The page includes text, images, sometimes other media, and a definition of the structure / style that tells the browser how to present it. The content all comes from servers that might be far away from me. 🖼 🌎
In the olden days the HTML page was just sitting on the server hosting the site, sent to you when your browser requested it.
As the construction of web content became more dynamic, the server could build pages on the fly, which meant the experience could be different each time someone loaded the same address.
With the advent of cloud computing, the processing involved in delivering a website also became distributed across physical locations instead of coming from one server.
So maybe I visit the same site every day, but some of the assets, like the logo, don’t actually change very often. It’s kind of wasteful to download that fresh every day – it makes the experience slower than it might be, and there’s a cost to the website provider every time someone visits... 💸