How We Built a Global Edge Network in 6 Months

When we started DeployStack, we knew that edge deployment was the future. But building a global edge network from scratch? That seemed like a multi-year, multi-million dollar undertaking. Here is how we did it in six months.

The Problem: Latency Kills Conversions

Every 100ms of latency costs 1% in revenue. For a global SaaS product, serving from a single US region means users in Asia and Europe experience 200-400ms of unnecessary round-trip time. We needed to fix this.

Architecture Decisions

We made three key architectural decisions early on:

• Anycast routing -- Every PoP shares the same IP addresses, and BGP routes users to the nearest one automatically
• Immutable deployments -- Each deployment is a complete, self-contained artifact distributed to all PoPs simultaneously
• V8 isolates for edge compute -- Instead of containers, we use V8 isolates for sub-millisecond cold starts

// Edge function example
export default {
  async fetch(request, env) {
    const url = new URL(request.url);
    const country = request.headers.get('cf-ipcountry');

    // Route to nearest origin
    const origin = env.ORIGINS[country] || env.ORIGINS.default;
    return fetch(origin + url.pathname, request);
  }
}

The Results

After six months of building:

• 47 PoPs across 6 continents
• p50 latency: 23ms globally (down from 180ms)
• 99.99% uptime since launch
• Sub-second deploys with incremental propagation

"The best infrastructure is the kind your users never think about. They just notice everything feels fast."

What's Next

We are working on edge databases -- bringing data closer to compute so your entire application runs at the edge, not just the routing layer. Stay tuned for our announcement in Q1 2025.