Content Delivery Networks or CDNs have received a lot of attention in the last few years, with the emergence of newer and richer feature capabilities and features. Companies like Fastly and CloudFlare have entered the market with a focus on helping developers leverage the power of edge computing and hyper-locality to users by caching static content close to where it is being used.

The cloud is going through a great tectonic shift. Put simply, we're now entering a new phase of the cloud where the main assumptions underlying its architecture inhibit it from solving emerging problems with data processing. The biggest shift in how we create data and use it is happening hidden in plain sight. The shift is from seeing and using data like its a historical record (seeing the world in the past tense), to seeing and using data as a dynamic set of events happening continuously in the now (seeing the world in the present tense instead of past tense) anywhere in the world.

We are told that low latency and imagination are the only prerequisites for building tomorrow’s edge applications. Tragically, this is an incomplete and false hope. In order for robust, world-changing edge native applications to emerge, we must first solve the very thorny problem of bringing stateful data to the edge. Without stateful data, the edge will be doomed to forever being nothing more