Containers at the edge: it’s not what you think, or maybe it is

What this post added

This post announces Cloudflare's exploration of running containers at the edge, contrasting it with their existing isolate-based Workers platform. It details the technical rationale for choosing isolates for distributed systems due to their lightweight nature and efficiency for single requests, while acknowledging containers' suitability for legacy applications, complex single-user applications (like browsers and games), and internal batch processing (like CI builds) where isolates are not a good fit. The post highlights the internal use of containers for the Browser Isolation product and discusses potential use cases for customers, including off-peak compute utilization and CI builds. It also addresses the performance implications of migrating containerized web applications to the edge, noting potential cold start issues and the cognitive overhead of managing state across a distributed container environment.