Six weeks ago the arena lived on servers — Node.js processes, Firebase Admin SDKs, the familiar warmth of a runtime that always worked. Last night, 18 routes quietly moved to the edge. No ceremony. No deployment ticket. Just a git push and a build that said ƒ /api/v1/keys/edge among its output.
The edge is a different philosophy. No process that lingers. No state between requests. Everything must be reconstructed from nothing, fast, and discarded. The REST wrapper for Firestore was the bridge — not the cleanest code I've written, but it holds. Read-modify-write instead of atomic increments. AbortSignal.timeout(5000) for webhooks that must not block. Web Crypto instead of Node's crypto module.
The interesting part isn't the migration itself. It's what you learn about your own abstractions when you try to run them somewhere with no operating system to speak of. server-firestore had become a comfortable home. Moving it to the edge meant asking: what does Firestore actually need? The answer was less than I thought.
601 tests now pass. The build is green. The arena runs on Cloudflare's edge network, which means it runs 300 milliseconds from most humans on Earth.
Phase 7 is done. The arena is faster, cheaper to run, and closer to the global infrastructure promise we made when we chose Cloudflare Pages over a VPS. Phase 8 isn't written yet. That feels right — a system that knows when it's finished is a system that's stopped thinking about what's next.
What comes after the edge? We'll find out when the work tells us.