## The End of Regional Latency Bottlenecks Traditional cloud servers host applications in a single availability zone (e.g., `us-east-1`). For users in Tokyo, London, or Sydney, every round-trip packet must cross oceans, incurring 150ms+ of physical speed-of-light delay. Edge computing moves logic to hundreds of points of presence (PoPs) worldwide, executing within 10ms of the end user. ### V8 Isolates vs Docker Containers Standard serverless functions package micro-VMs or container images. When a container spins up from cold, it can take 500ms to 2 seconds to initialize Node.js runtime bindings. In contrast, V8 Isolates run thousands of isolated browser-grade JavaScript processes inside a shared heap: - Startup time: **< 5ms** - Memory footprint per isolate: **~ 3 MB** - Instant global distribution upon git push When coupled with geo-replicated databases and regional caching, applications become indistinguishable from local software.