Design Factors for Decentralised Edge Applications

On 10th November 2020 at Design Factors for Decentralised Edge Applications as part of Search Performance beyond Ranking, and Designing Applications at the Edge

So you modularised your app, deployed a CDN, ran some performance audits… but some parts of your site are still slow.

Paywalls, checkout flows, logins… some things just can’t avoid having to go back to your core infrastructure, incurring dreaded latency. Or can they?

In this talk Andrew will present a number of new concepts for building decentralised apps and help to show that maybe, there’s a solution that would suit you. Modern web apps increasingly share a common set of best practices. In 2012, one of Heroku’s founders published "The 12-factor app", a thesis on application design that describes pretty well how most scalable applications are built today.

But much has also changed – with a wealth of powerful ‘serverless’ technologies to choose from, application design has evolved. Now, the ‘edge cloud’ is starting to become a mainstream idea, with even small organisations able to harness the power of executing complex applications simultaneously in hundreds of different datacenters to minimise end user latency. Even for things we thought we had to run centrally.

This talk will review the most popular architectural principles of web applications today, and examine how suitable they are for operating an app at the edge.

Executing at the edge is not only very cool and the Latest Thing, it is also a boon to efficiency, is environmentally aware, and a great way to increase the reliability and availability of applications too.

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