Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

Using async for functions that do not use await is still a good idea because thrown errors are converted to rejected promises.

`return await` can be useful because it's a signal that the value is async, causes the current function to be included in the async stack trace, and completes local try/catch/finally blocks when the promise resolves

Cloud Functions is literally code you're running in the cloud. And the moment you approach their limit(ation)s, you will see the same "rising cloud deployment costs"

> Running a WASM engine on the cloud means ... a fraction of the overhead of a container or nodejs environment

You do realise that there are other languages than javascript in nodejs? That there other environments than cloud functions? And that you can skip that overhead entirely by running with a different language in a different environment? Or even run Rust in AWS Lambda if you so wish?

> so there’s no lock-in with the language that the Serverless provider mandates.

And at the same time you're advertising for a runtime lock in. This doesn't compute.

> Web pages that are as ancient as the early 90s are perfectly rendered even today... Basically, it means a WASM binary is future proof by default.

It's not future proof.

Web Pages from the 90s are not actually rendered perfectly today because browsers didn't agree on a standard rendering until late 2000s, and many web pages from the 90s and 2000s were targeting a specific browser's feature set and rendering quirks. Web Pages from the 90s are rendered good enough (and they had few things to render to begin with).

As web's standards approach runaway asymptotical complexity, their "future-proofness" is also also questionable. Chrome broke audio [1], browsers are planning to remove alert/confirm/prompt [2], some specs are deprecated after barely seeing the light of day [3], some specs are just shitty and require backtracking or multiple additional specs on top to fix the most glaring holes, etc.

> I've published my (ranty) notes on why Serverless will eventually replace Kubernetes as the dominant software deployment technique

"Let's replace somewhat unlimited code with severely limited, resource constrained code running in a slow VM in a shared instance" is not a good take.

[1] https://www.usgamer.net/articles/google-chromes-latest-updat...

[2] https://dev.to/richharris/stay-alert-d

[3] https://chromestatus.com/feature/4642138092470272 and https://www.w3.org/TR/html-imports/

To me, the only value I see for Edge compute is when some chunk of data requires processing going one way across the network, and that processing can be done entirely locally. I suppose what you describe with the meta tag qualifies in this case, otherwise I think serverless architecture looks like a pretty sweet deal for the cloud companies promoting it.

Kenton Varda did a pretty great writeup on CF worker security [0]. Would love to see Deno Deploy do something similar.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/mitigating-spectre-and-other-sec...