Cross Region Unikernels at the Edge
It seems that all the cool companies are doing cross-region geo-routing for applications today. Many of them will label this as "edge". For someone like myself, edge usually means something different like having actual devices at sea, in the air, on a cell tower, in a Tesla, etc but if you are coming from the CDN world that translates to having multiple POPs (point of presence) spread throughout the world where you can host typically static sites (like javascript, css, etc.) closer to the end-user. Indeed many of the traditional CDN providers have evolved their offerings from hosting these static portions to running "edge functions" which provide some form of compute.
Companies like Vercel, Fly.io, Cloudflare (workers), Render, Supabase, and more are all advertising this. If you are more of a front-end dev this can make a lot of sense if your code is mostly static and you rely on external services for things like state.
I should point out - there is a massive caveat here. Things get a *lot* trickier when you want to manage state (read: databases) across the world. Hundreds to thousands of milliseconds is no laughing matter and presents real challenges even to companies whose sole existence is dedicated to distributed databases as any blogpost by Kyle will painfully point out. At a certain point you are fighting physics.
