For years the conventional wisdom held that consolidation was king. But a growing cohort of platform teams is reversing course, distributing compute closer to where requests actually originate and treating the data center as a fallback rather than a foundation.
"We stopped thinking about servers and started thinking about request lifetimes," said one infrastructure lead who asked not to be named while their migration is still underway. The results, they claim, have been dramatic: tail latency down by double digits, and on-call pages down even further.
What changed
The shift is partly economic and partly cultural. Egress pricing, long the silent tax on ambitious architectures, has collapsed at several providers, removing the financial penalty for moving data to the user instead of the other way around.
At the same time, a new generation of tooling has made it trivial to ship the same artifact to dozens of regions at once, eliminating the operational drag that once made such designs the exclusive domain of hyperscalers.
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