What Is Edge Rendering and Why It Matters
Understand how edge runtimes eliminate origin latency and why React SSR at the edge beats traditional servers.
The Traditional Server Bottleneck
A traditional web server is hosted in a single geographic region. Users close to that region experience fast responses, but users far away suffer significant latency — a user in Tokyo requesting content from a US-East server adds 200+ ms of round-trip time before the first byte arrives.
What a CDN Does (and Doesn't Do)
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches static files like images, CSS, and JavaScript at dozens of Points of Presence (PoPs) worldwide, serving them from the nearest location. However, a traditional CDN cannot execute code — it can only serve pre-built, static content.
All lessons in this course
- What Is Edge Rendering and Why It Matters
- React on Cloudflare Workers with Hono
- Streaming SSR from the Edge
- Edge Caching Strategies for React Apps