Edgemesh

Edgemesh uses Cloudflare Workers to reduce costs and improve performance of their client-side web optimization solutions

Instead of offering customers server-side optimization, Edgemesh speeds up the client side by optimizing cache hits at the Content Delivery Network (CDN) edge in the browser. Customers around the world can add a single line of code to their websites and reap the customer conversion benefits of improved website performance.

Challenge: Client-side optimization requires a high-performance edge computing

Edgemesh takes a unique approach to website optimization by focusing on accelerating content via intelligent client-side optimizations. When combined with Cloudflare’s industry leading server-side performance, Edgemesh enabled sites can load 20-50% faster with just a single line of code or a one click Cloudflare App. Edgemesh works by creating a dedicated client-side cache powered by the browser’s Service Worker API. Instead of trying to predict the user’s interactions with the site and prefetching the next page, Edgemesh focuses on caching and prefetching the individual assets (fonts, JavaScript, CSS and images) that are most commonly used across all pages. By intelligently prefetching fonts, Javascript, and similar shared content that is not currently in the browser’s local cache, Edgemesh helps a site load faster and stay faster automatically. With the increased performance push driven by recent search engine ranking factors (like Google’s Core Web Vitals) , Edgemesh has seen a dramatic uptick in customer demand for it’s low friction acceleration solution.

As a long-time customer of Cloudflare, Edgemesh eagerly tries out new products and features when they become available. “Like many companies, Edgmesh grew up with Cloudflare. As the platform has expanded to new capabilities, we’ve been able to leverage these performance wins time and time again” said Loveless. When Cloudflare Workers, an edge-based serverless platform, became available, along with Workers Key-Value (KV), and Cache API, Edgemesh saw an opportunity to overhaul and optimize their products with Workers. “Wth Edgemesh version 4, we went all in with Cloudflare Workers. We completely redesigned how our customer facing API’s worked, and we were able to move 95% of our solution to run on the edge.”

Workers improves API performance by five times and decreases computing costs by 72%

Workers enables Edgemesh to move their code closer to the websites that use it. “With Workers and Cache API, we’ve implemented 95% of our API at the Cloudflare network edge. Today, almost all the API endpoints that we use run on Workers.”

The switch to Workers provided significant benefits to Edgemesh, and was completed by a team of three in less than 5 months. According to Edgemesh CTO Randy LeBeau, “The vast majority of our software now runs on Cloudflare, and the performance benefits of that are pretty extreme. Our customer APIs are now 5x faster than the cloud hosted version. The management overhead has also dropped to the floor, with Cloudflare’s elastic compute scaling up as needed - a critical feature that we need for times like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.”

Workers also enables Edgemesh to optimize and save money on their infrastructure. Loveless says, “We need to be able to service clients, wherever they are on the globe. So prior to our port to workers - we had to have infrastructure hosted in the US, in Europe, in Southeast Asia. That meant paying a lot for infrastructure all just to get fast response times. Now that we’ve offloaded so much to Cloudflare, we cut our cloud computing bill by 72% globally.”

Cloudflare solutions make it easy to launch new solutions, test site changes, and more

With Workers, Edgemesh can deploy new solutions more quickly. After a recent widespread Internet outage, customers were concerned about the dependency of their sites on certain platforms. Loveless recalls, “We were discussing the value of a tool where people put in their website and see all their third-party network and infrastructure dependencies. One of the devs said, ‘I can knock that out. I'll just do a quick Worker site.’ And it was ready by the end of the day.”

Argo Smart Routing also simplifies Edgemesh’s deployment processes. “With Tunnel, we can quickly spin up backend infrastructure in Kubernetes, and Tunnel handles IP allocation and routing,” LeBeau says. “Plus, none of our infrastructure has a public IP address. That’s both a big security and operational win.”

Edgemesh also takes advantage of Cloudflare Load Balancing when testing changes to sites. According to Loveless, “Cloudflare Load Balancing makes Canary deployments very easy. You can just tell the Worker to intercept a production route and randomly send some traffic to hit a different endpoint instead. When combined with Argo tunnels, we can build sophisticated load balancing and traffic sharding solutions in hours. It has made Canary deployments a lot easier because it's all just JavaScript.”

A secure solution for global scalability

Cloudflare solutions enable Edgemesh’s software to achieve higher performance and scalability, but Loveless says that is not the only reason they use Cloudflare. “Cloudflare gives us the security and the scale that we need to deliver software to customers around the globe.”