Visitors can now load a site's files from nearby operator nodes

Until now, visitors to a public site got every file from one of our gateways. Operator nodes, the machines people run at home, could take part only in narrow cases, and almost never for a site’s own addresses.

Now, when a site is placed on operator nodes, a visitor’s browser can fetch the site’s images, scripts, styles and fonts from them:

• Nodes behind home routers count. The browser reaches them over WebRTC, with a relay when a direct connection isn’t possible.
• Every piece is checked against the record made when the site was uploaded, before it’s used. A piece that fails, or a node that’s slow or unreachable, falls back to the gateway.
• Pages always come from the gateway, along with navigations and anything the edge adds to a page.
• Nothing changes for you. Your site’s addresses stay the same, and the browser handles all of it.

Which sites

Level 0 sites on their own domain, once they’re placed on operator nodes. Most sites’ settings no longer keep them on the gateway:

• A _headers file doesn’t rule a site out when the headers it sets on files make no difference to a file served from a node. That covers Cache-Control, CORS headers, X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff, Referrer-Policy, X-Frame-Options, Permissions-Policy, and a Content-Security-Policy, whether enforced or report-only.
• Other headers on files still keep the whole site on the gateway, such as Set-Cookie, a Content-Type override, or anything not on that list. Headers that apply only to pages never count, because pages always come from the gateway.
• The # ee:trailing-slash on option doesn’t rule a site out. Any address it could redirect always goes to the gateway.
• A forced (!) redirect rules a site out only if it matches a real file that isn’t a page. Rules that move old page addresses don’t.
• Some files always come from the gateway, on every site: embedded documents, frames and workers, any script or stylesheet whose file type is wrong for it, and your _headers and _redirects files themselves.

Getting your site placed

For now, our team places sites on operator nodes on request. Ask through customer support with the domain you’d like placed, and we’ll set it up. Placement follows your domain, so every later deploy is placed automatically. Like everything else during the open beta, it’s free.

This was the original promise of the Evolving Edge network, it just took us a minute to get there.