8 posts tagged with "edge"

Recently, Netlify announced Edge Functions where you can run your code at edge locations on Deno runtime with globally low latency. In this post, we will build a simple app which runs Netlify Edge functions and accesses Upstash Redis as a data store. Upstash Redis is a perfect match for Netlify Edge Functions because:

• Upstash Redis has Global database type where the Redis replicas are distributed all over the world. So your edge function will access to the closest region with low latency.
• Upstash Redis has a built-in REST API and SDK which is free from any connection issues common in serverless runtimes.
• Upstash Redis has a JS SDK which is built and tested with Deno runtime

In this post, we will create a waiting room for your Next.js application using Vercel Edge functions and Upstash Redis.

You can check the source code and the demo app.

Waiting Room?​

The waiting room is useful when you want to limit the number of active visitors to your website so as not to overload your resources.

In our implementation, you will be able to set a maximum number of active visitors. There will two parameters to control the traffic:

• Max website capacity: Max number of visitors in the website at the same time?
• Max session timeout: Max number of seconds that a visitor can stay idle

In this post, we will write a simple application which will run on Fastly Compute@Edge. The application will access Upstash Redis to keep track of page views.

Motivation​

Edge Computing is one of the most exciting trends in recent years. CDN services like Cloudflare and Fastly started to enable users to run their applications on their edge infrastructure. This helps developers to build globally distributed, high performance applications.

We are thrilled to announce Upstash Kafka today. Upstash Kafka is the first Serverless Kafka offering. With a pay-per-request model, you can have a fully managed Kafka cluster without paying hundreds of dollars. With the free tier, you can create a Kafka cluster in seconds and without entering your credit card. The Upstash team takes care of availability, maintenance, scaling, upgrades and all the other tedious stuff while you focus on your app.

Why Kafka?​

When we first launched our Redis service, it quickly became popular in the serverless community. More than 8,000 databases have been created since February. This number is much higher than we expected when we first launched Upstash. We continue to improve our Redis service. But we also realized how great is the need for data solutions that fit into the new serverless world.

In this blog post, we will implement a waiting room page for your website.

Why?​

High number of visitors on your website is a good thing generally but not always. Sudden high traffic may easily overwhelm your applications which may disrupt your services completely. Waiting room is a solution that helps you to control the traffic and protect your resources during traffic surges. Cloudflare Waiting Room is a good solution but it is only available for business and enterprise accounts. Don’t worry, in this blog we will build a waiting room for any type of web site using Cloudflare Workers and Upstash Redis.

What are Next.js Functions? Why are they important?​

Today, the Vercel team announced the Next.js Edge functions. Edge functions allow developers to run their code at the servers distributed globally. This means your code will be executed at the location that is closest to your user. You can think of edge functions as the serverless functions which are run at the CDN infrastructure. Edge functions have the following advantages:

• Global low latency: Because the code is replicated to many global locations (PoP: points of presence), a user anywhere in the world will experience low latency. Each client will fetch the response from the nearest server.
• No cold start: Edge infrastructure providers use V8 Isolates which eliminates the cold starts. This means much faster startups.

Upstash started its journey with a mission to be the best database option for your AWS Lambda functions. Meanwhile, we discovered another great option to build your serverless functions: Cloudflare Workers. It is an exciting product because it promises a better latency all over the world with a lower cost and no cold starts. But it has many limitations when compared to AWS Lambda. Extra limitations makes the list of database options shorter. We saw this as an opportunity to position Upstash as a great solution for the question: CF Workers are stateless. Where should I keep my data then?

1 ms latency is easy with Redis when the database and clients are in the same region. But if you want the clients to be globally distributed then the latency rises over 100 ms. We built Edge Caching to overcome this.