Core concepts

This documentation will introduce you to the core concepts related to an efficient and decentralized computation at the edge of the network, as well as Azion’s principles to understand and manage the platform.

What’s edge computing?

Edge computing is a highly-distributed computing paradigm that aims to bring computation and data storage closer to the location where it’s needed, typically near the “edge” of the network. It enables the building and management of modern applications able to meet the growing demand for real-time processing, reduced latency, improved data privacy, and the ability to handle the massive amount of data generated nowadays.

What’s an edge-native platform?

Following edge computing principles, an edge-native platform must be designed to operate efficiently at the edge of a network. For this reason, the platform should possess several key characteristics and functionalities to meet the unique challenges and requirements of edge computing:

• Seamless experience for application development, security, orchestration, and observability.
• NoOps and self-service approach.
• Open standards.
• Continuous monitoring and observability.
• Performance optimization tools to optimize resource allocation and application performance.
• Geographical coverage and traffic optimization strategies.

About Azion Edge Platform

Azion Edge Platform is an edge-native and full-stack platform that simplifies building and running modern applications anywhere: on Azion’s-operated network edge, remote devices, on-premises, or multi-cloud.

As an edge-native platform, Azion runs on a highly distributed network, with automatic deployment, monitoring of applications, and managing the whole CI/CD pipeline. Designed to operate efficiently at the edge, the platform offers a wide range of benefits, including low latency, a distributed architecture, scalability, efficiency, real-time processing and analytics, orchestration, and seamless management, among other advantages.

Azion’s platform enables you to handle each step in the process of building and managing edge applications: Build, Secure, Deploy, and Observe, including tasks such as:

• Build and deploy edge applications that run directly on the edge of the network.
• Use templates and integrations to speed up your deployment and test pre-built solutions.
• Create zero trust architectures to protect your content and applications.
• Improve your content delivery by relying in a highly distributed network.
• Define caching rules, custom optimizations, and advanced configurations.
• Monitor your applications with data in real time.
• Improve your performance, with lower latency and bandwidth usage, while reducing operational costs.
• Develop with different supported frameworks and languages.
• Migrate your architecture and content to the edge.
• Observe compliance laws.

How Azion Edge Platform attends a request

Azion Edge Platform is build over a robust infrastructure composed of various key components, as well as business logic and rules that allow for offering a reliable, scalable, and high-performance service.

Taking advantage of its distributed network and decentralized infrastructure, it quickly serves the requests with low latency and less bandwidth consumption, optimizing the content delivery and enhancing user experience.

Azion’s platform works, on a high-level, this way:

1. A request is sent to a web service running on the Azion Edge Platform and it defines, using software-define routing, the better path to the request and redirected it to the closest edge location.

• In this context, closer refers to the edge node that can serve the user request the fastest, based on a variety of factors such as geographic location, network conditions, server load, among others.

2. Inside the edge node, the request is processed by multiple functional modules before sending back an appropriate response to the user. This occurs to apply all the adequate business logic, configurations, and parameters to the request. Through the Azion products, customers are able to implement, control, monitor, scale, and automate resources at the edge, in real time.

• The request is redirected to the origin just in case the edge node hasn’t an appropriate response.

3. The response is sent to the user or device.

Platform management

Azion has developed a control panel and a set of APIs used by customers and the Azion team to manage the Azion Edge Platform. It runs on the edge and leverages a microservices architecture and a proprietary front-end framework, ensuring security and high availability.

You can access it and get a simple and fast user experience through:

• Azion Console: it’s the configuration interface. With Console, you have access to all the products and services provided by Azion, being able to create and manage them. Azion Console also enables the management of provisioning, accounting, billing, and user permissions.
• Azion CLI: it’s an open source tool that enables the management of services using a terminal. The Azion CLI is built in Go.
• Azion API: it’s a RESTful API based on HTTPS requests. It allows you to integrate your systems with Azion’s platform and create new applications and services, as well as checking, removing, or updating existing settings.
• Azion Terraform Provider: Terraform communicates with the Azion APIs, so you can manage your infrastructure hosted on the Azion’s platform, locally, as code.