Close but Not Local

A team moves its personalization logic into CDN edge compute (edge functions running at each POP). The function reads a user profile from the primary Postgres instance in us-east-1 and injects the user's name into the page. Latency for users in Sydney barely improves. Why?

Edge runtimes cap outbound connection concurrency, so the database calls queue up at the POP whenever load is high

The function still round trips to us-east-1, so edge compute moves where the wait starts, not how far the data is

Edge functions cold-start on each request, and that startup cost cancels out the proximity gain for Sydney users

Edge compute runs after the cache lookup, so a cache miss forces the whole response through the origin path anyway