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Terminology

Every platform has its own vocabulary. This is Edge's, in plain English: the words you'll meet in the docs, in Control and around the network, each defined in a sentence or two.

CoversCDNComputeDNSStorageShieldAssistAgent APIPlatform

Products#

  • CDN: Edge’s content delivery network. Caches and serves your sites and assets from nodes close to your users, with zero egress fees. Learn more.
  • Compute: Virtual machines on the Edge network. Deploy apps, containers, and full VMs to locations near your users. Learn more.
  • DNS: Authoritative DNS hosting on a global anycast network. Free, fast, and API-first. Learn more.
  • Storage: S3-compatible object storage with zero egress. Files live in buckets and can be served directly or through the CDN. Learn more.
  • Shield: Privacy-first bot protection without puzzles. Scores each visitor’s humanity and verifies legitimate AI agents rather than blocking everything non-human. Learn more.
  • Assist: Conversational agents for your website. Answers questions using your own content, embedded with one line of code. Learn more.
  • Control: The Edge customer console at /console, where you create and manage deployments, billing, and account settings. Learn more.
  • Agent API: The machine-facing interface that lets AI agents discover, deploy, and manage Edge resources autonomously: the “agentic cloud”. Learn more.

The network#

  • Node: Any machine contributing capacity to the network, from a Raspberry Pi in an attic to rack hardware in a data centre, running the Edge node software. Learn more.
  • Relay: An infrastructure node that routes traffic and coordinates work across the nodes around it, connecting them to the wider network.
  • PoP: Point of presence: a network location that serves traffic. Edge’s PoPs include both strategic data-centre sites and contributed devices. Learn more.
  • Explorer: The public view of the network: every online node on a live map, with per-node detail. Learn more.
  • Reputation: A node’s earned trust score, built through uptime and successful jobs. Higher reputation brings more and better work.
  • Stake: A refundable security deposit that gives a node access to trust-sensitive work, or voting rights in governance. Returned when you leave; forfeited only for abuse.

Billing#

  • Prepaid balance: Money you’ve added to your account up front. Usage draws down from it before anything touches your card.
  • Pay as you go: Usage-based billing with a card on file: you pay for what you use, topped up automatically.
  • Monthly cap: An optional hard limit on monthly spend. When the cap is reached, paid usage stops rather than billing past it.
  • Free tier: The allowance included with every product before any payment is needed, e.g. 500k CDN requests or 250 Assist questions a month.
  • Zero egress: Edge doesn’t charge for data transfer out, on any product, at any scale. Bills are based on what you use or store, never on bytes moved. Learn more.

Governance#

  • Governance: How network changes are decided: proposals raised, debated, and voted on in the open by governance stakeholders. Learn more.
  • DAO: The organisation that stewards the network (founders, core developers and advisors), holding a collective veto over governance proposals.

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