Edge Notes

Scratchpad for protocol and edge-computing notes.

Lightweight transport

Proxy protocols over a commodity CDN are mostly an exercise in framing. The interesting part is not the tunnel itself but how much of the handshake you can compress without breaking middlebox heuristics.

Observations

• Latency to the edge dominates. Anycast geography matters more than raw bandwidth.
• TLS handshake reuse is the cheapest optimization available to a client.
• WebSocket framing adds a few bytes per write; batching at the client matters.

Implementation notes

Header layout: version | uuid[16] | optLen | opt | cmd | port[2] | atyp | addr. Command 1 is a stream, command 3 is datagram with a two-byte length prefix.