appfleet, a new edge compute platform goes live
Tags: devops, docker, cloud, serverless
Published: 2021-03-01 10:39:10

First of all what is appfleet? [appfleet is an edge compute platform](https://appfleet.com/) that allows people to deploy their web applications globally. Instead of running your code in a single centralized location you can now run it everywhere, at the same time.

In simpler terms appfleet is a next-gen CDN, instead of being limited to only serving static content closer to your users you can now do the same thing for your whole codebase. Run the whole thing where just your cache used to be.

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This results in drastic performance improvement, lower latency, better uptime and an enormous amount of new use-cases and possibilities.

In part it's because we are not limiting our users to HTTP services. You have complete freedom to run any kind of service over any protocol you want, on any port. 

Do you want to build your own global nameservers? Deploy a container running a DNS server over UDP port 53. It takes only a few clicks. A globally distributed database? Sure thing. Or something simple like image optimization on the edge? No problem. How about a monstrous container running a web service, redis, ssh, DNS, MySQL and an admin service all on different ports, all at the same time? Who are we to stop you, go ahead!

![The appfleet dashboard showing your deployed applications](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/hdm665ssv1g3v3s1wjd1.png)

We launched our closed beta quite a while ago. And since then we have worked with many developers and business owners to improve our platform and support the many exciting use-cases that people kept coming up with.

And while the system was technically ready to accept real customers months ago, we decided it was best to stay in beta and ensure the stability of the platform.

Since then we have polished our user-experience, redesigned many parts of our UI multiple times and made sure our backend is ready for whatever people throw at it.

Do you know what is the first thing people run when given a container and asked to test it? They run a fork bomb.  Of course we were ready for that and while the specific instance became unavailable it had no impact on our system or other clients. All thanks to the multiple layers of isolation we have built. And nowadays the instance won't even go down, so fork-bomb away.

Each container runs in a virtualized box of its own, with its own resources, filesystem and security in place. Security and stability were top priorities for us and everything we built had that in mind.

Whenever we were working on a new feature we kept asking ourselves "What if?". "What if this system goes down?", "What if the user does something unexpected?"

![appfleet cluster creation process and region selection](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/3e41sfbu13p9jyirb8rx.png)

appfleet is based on multiple services and modules interacting with each other. We made sure that even if something breaks, like our whole API goes down, or our DB, or anything else really, the already running applications would not feel a thing. Everything is built to run in standalone mode and if the worst happens to wait until things get better.

We also drew from our experience building and maintaining [jsDelivr](https://www.jsdelivr.com/), a free CDN for open source projects that currently serves 100 billion requests every month and more than 3 Petabytes of traffic! It is used by millions of websites all over the world and all of them trust us to ensure it never goes down. We integrated multiple levels of failover with multiple checks on every step to ensure the system can automatically handle different kinds of issues and fix itself.

The appfleet platform was built to be as simple as possible and make edge compute accessible to everyone, from open source projects, to solo developers and even big enterprises that need something that works without relying on an army of DevOps engineers. This is one of the reasons we decided to build on top of containers, this allows our users to easily migrate to or from appfleet and to even run legacy applications.

Today March 1st 2021 is the beginning of a long an exciting journey to make the web faster and accessible to all!

[Register now and get $10 of free credits](https://dashboard.appfleet.com/register) to use as you see fit. No need to enter your credit card until you are ready for production workloads.

And if you are a non-profit or an open source project let us know to get sponsored with free services. We even offer [free design services](https://github.com/jsdelivr/jsdelivr/issues/18154)

Join us and make sure you send us your feedback and ideas! Even better email the founder directly at d@appfleet.com