EdgeFunctions: Serverless Computing for Real-World Applications

Original source: Limelight Networks

Delivering compelling user experiences is growing more complex, especially in streaming video. It’s the norm – not the exception – to use services and technologies from many vendors to deliver the instant gratification your audience expects. Increasingly, developers are integrating services to deliver video streams, authenticate users, personalize content, serve the optimal video profile, protect your content, and more. Meanwhile, you’re designing new features and innovations to improve your viewers’ experiences.

The question is -- where should these functions be performed and how should they scale? Handling them in a centralized datacenter can add latency, create a sluggish viewer experience, and may also add unnecessary costs. Here’s where serverless computing and Edgio’s new EdgeFunctions come into play.

EdgeFunctions provides a platform for content providers to deploy their own application functions into Edgio’s network edge locations and run them on demand. It automatically makes your code available to edge locations worldwide, executes at the network edge closest to the user to ensure the lowest latency, and scales to meet demand. It’s ideally suited to video streaming and content delivery use cases such as personalized streaming, access control, dynamic ad insertion, content protection, A/B testing, and image manipulation.

Another benefit: With its serverless architecture, developers don’t have to wait for the underlying infrastructure to be stood up -- such as servers, storage or networking -- which can take months.

Instead, they can concentrate on writing and deploying code to create or enhance user application experiences. EdgeFunctions saves money by avoiding the traditional ‘always on’ server architecture. Customers only pay for the resources their functions consume when triggered.

Edgio EdgeFunctions means no more overprovisioning costs and no more worrying about scale or capacity. Just upload your code and Edgio takes care of the rest – serverless computing at its best.