Migration Playbook: From CDN to Compute-Adjacent Caching (2026)

Migration Playbook: From CDN to Compute-Adjacent Caching (2026)

Hook: The move to compute-adjacent caching is organizational as much as it is technical. In 2026, success requires clear migration phases, measurement plans, and cross-functional ownership.

Phase 0 — Discovery and alignment

Start by answering: which origin costs are you trying to reduce? Common targets include image transforms, repeated inference outputs and personalized fragments. Align stakeholders in product, finance and legal. Examples in the ecosystem—like gaming bundle launches—show how cross-team coordination can make or break a launch.

Phase 1 — Prototyping

Pick a low-risk, high-frequency route to prototype. The goals are simple:

• Measure origin offload.
• Detect impact on tail latency.
• Validate security and compliance posture (consent flags, PII).

Tip: keep your origin as a fallback and enable circuit-breaker thresholds in the edge runtime.

Phase 2 — Policy and governance

Define policies for cache keys, TTLs, and consent. Implement an approval workflow for new cacheable endpoints and require SBOMs for any vendor runtimes you deploy. Consider authorization services for decisioning performed at the edge.

Phase 3 — Scale and orchestration

Introduce orchestration for cache pre-warming, cross-region replication and purge policies. Watch out for cache stampedes during large coordinated events; warm-first invalidation strategies and coordinated priming scripts (used by game shops during drops) are great patterns here.

Phase 4 — Costing and chargebacks

Refactor billing: map edge function invocations, egress and origin cost into product-level KPIs. In many orgs, the product team must own the net hosting bill after migration. Consult independent economic models for conversational hosting to help create realistic projections.

Phase 5 — Hardening and audit

Implement continuous audits for provenance, privacy and firmware integrity for devices in partner locations. Integration with authorization platforms and supply-chain reviews for firmware are non-negotiable if your edge layer performs decisioning.

Playbook tips and gotchas

• Start small: prototype on non-critical endpoints.
• Instrument aggressively: regional SLOs and hit-reason labels are essential.
• Negotiate vendor SLAs: include deterministic cold-start windows in contracts and penalties for violating them.
• Plan for rollbacks: staged canaries and the ability to purge or disable edge transforms quickly.

Organizational advice

This migration blurs the lines between product, infra, and security. Create a cross-functional migration steering committee and surface monthly readouts. Use procurement checklists for third-party edge devices and treat authorization-as-a-service evaluations as part of the vendor selection process.

Where to learn more

Reference architecture and economic analyses are critical. Practical resources include industry studies on edge caching evolution, hosting economics for conversational agents, peering and regional expansion reports, and reviews about authorization services and firmware supply-chain risks.

These cross-cutting reads will help you balance user experience, cost, and compliance during your migration.