Edge
The edge is the network of data centres a request reaches first, close to the person making it. Code that runs at the edge starts in the same place the request landed instead of travelling to one origin region, which is what keeps a flow’s latency measured in tens of milliseconds rather than hundreds.
What it means
An edge runtime is not a small server: it starts per request, has no machine to keep warm, and is billed for the work it does rather than for the time it waits. The trade is a constrained environment — a request-scoped execution budget, and storage reached through bindings rather than through a local disk.
How SwiftTune uses it
Both the platform and the flows it publishes run on Cloudflare Workers. Work that cannot finish inside one request — a deployment, a long evaluation — is split into steps and handed to queues, rather than held open behind a streaming response that hides the limit until it is hit.