> In the past, requests went out to a hosted execution service. Today, they run on MicroVMs inside our own edge network

The isolates were not being run at the edge.

from the article: "With our old infrastructure it went out over the internet, ran the edge function, and came back to us to pass on. With the new compute platform, the request is forwarded to a compute node within our network."

As far as I know, Cloudflare Workers have always executed within Cloudflare's network, not gone out to the internet and executed elsewhere (which I read as being in a hyperscaler cloud).

"In the past, requests went out to a hosted execution service."

They were outsourcing to another company so there's plenty of room for overhead to creep in.

v8 isolates aren't actually a great sandbox and I would not trust them implicitly in the AI era. This is probably why they wrap them in an additional sandbox.

V8 is extremely optimized for script startup time.

This is technical content, written for a technical audience, being shared on HN. In that context, it's not particularly esoteric. If "5x faster Edge Functions" means nothing to you, that's a good signal that you can just skip it without FOMO. If you're familiar with the concept but not Firecracker (a popular microVM) specifically, the expectation is that you'll use search engines and/or LLMs to get up to speed.