Edge Worker starter knowledge

[mokimo]

Description

I've conducted a due diligence for finding out on how edge workers (EWs) can help improving performance on adobe.com and want to share my findings with the broader community in case someone is interested.

The idea(s)

Let's first illustrate the use-case I wanted to vet EWs for:

• Investigate combining scripts/utils/styles - e.g. CORE assets
• Investigate loading LCP Fragments via an EW
• Investigate hydrating placeholders via an EW
• Investigate georouting on the edge
• Investigate personalizing on the edge

One or all of those features could potentially live on the edge and if we had managed to shift those tasks onto the edge, we would have been able to get LCPs delivered a lot faster to our users, improving their experience on adobe.com.
Certain features might have first needed more legal guidance, but since we are not attempting this to begin with - we can forego this for simplicity.

The limitations

For milo core and performance, we did not decide to move forward with EWs for complexity reasons that would be required to roll this out on all consumers.

EWs are currently restricted to one EW per request and got a bunch of limitations

We could have had a main-EW delegating work to sub-scripts, however we'd need to merge a bunch of scripts and logic all happening on the edge increasing the overall complexity and maintainability.

We could have been working around all the limitations and complexity and make it work, but it would have been a bigger undertaking to make this work great and consistently across all adobe.com properties and hosted from within milo.

Current EW use-cases

There are some great use-cases, however IMO performance is currently not one of them. Here are some existing use-cases from people with more knowledge and context than I have:

• @Ben-Zahler uses and his team use EWs to guard pages that require special access
• @peller and the DC team currently use EWs to combine scripts/utils and do a bit of logic for performance reasons and even host their code on Github + set up auto deployments
  • https://github.com/adobecom/dc/blob/stage/.github/workflows/deploy-edgeworker.yml
  • https://github.com/adobecom/dc/blob/stage/edgeworkers/Acrobat_DC_web_prod/main.js
• @sukamat and team use them for Floodgate

A bit more basic info's

WebPS currently has the knowledge to help getting EWs up and running, so they'd be the ones to help getting them running. Apart of that, we do have a few engineers with context already that can help with initial guidance and trialing of EW use-cases.