Not really the "edge". Just a data center nearer the user, like Akamai.
Is it worth the hassle? All you're saving is latency in the backbone between the point of presence and your home data center. Does this beat directing requests to the nearest AWS region? As long as you're in roughly the right hemisphere and time zone, you're probably close enough.
Of course every "edge" is just another data center, but there's a massive rise in functions/serverless computing platforms focused on moving compute to more PoPs globally. Some have now graduated to running full containers as well.
If you have a stateless app, or state that can be deployed in multiple locations, then these are good solutions compared to doing it yourself and are relatively easier to deal with than the IaaS options of the clouds. Having it built into the CDN layer only helps with performance.
Edge can be defined as many things, and is currently being defined by the world in many ways.
At StackPath our definition of Edge is basically being as close as possible to the eyeballs aka users. Think of it as the front door to the internet.
Today our Edge expands across major IX's around the world and that's just the beginning. 5G is approaching us quickly along with container data centers.
The way we built our orchestration system it can deploy and manage workloads anywhere. In the future, that will include 5G container data centers which gets workloads even closer to things like self-driving cars, smart cities, IoT devices, <insert your idea here>.
"workloads even closer to things like self-driving cars, smart cities, IoT devices"
Oh, please. If you really need those last few milliseconds of lag reduced, you need local computation. If you don't, an AWS datacenter on the same continent is probably good enough.
It probably doesn't matter if you're in the US or Western Europe, but could matter a lot in other regions. I don't know about Stackpath's PoP but Cloudflare and Akamai have PoP with much lower latency in many regions than the next data center by a cloud provider.
Is it worth the hassle? All you're saving is latency in the backbone between the point of presence and your home data center. Does this beat directing requests to the nearest AWS region? As long as you're in roughly the right hemisphere and time zone, you're probably close enough.