It used to be client/server architecture. That became the cloud. With distributed content delivery infrastructures moving towards compute models, it became “edge.”
Whereas the debate has always been where code should run. On the server, that is remote, or with the client, that is possibly weak in compute and does not have the data necessary.
In the beginning it was all Mainframes, with dumb terminals. First Flash and than browsers allowed quick execution of code on the client side wide spread. With the advent of virtual cloud resources, cost effectiveness added to the equation. And so code moved back and forth between client and server.
Edge only became a marketing term for cloud providers to shift compute from the datacenter towards the client on their own terms.
Cloudflare now claims to have build a hybrid model, that they call the #Supercloud. I’d say it’s a bold marketing term. One that may actually hit a nerve.
Every developer wants to get code running on one machine and perfect it. It’s so much easier to work that way. We just happen to have one machine that scales to the size of the Internet: a global, distributed, supercomputer. It’s our Supercloud, and we build our own products on it, and you can too
From blog.cloudflare.com
