Origin-Edge-Client: applying Amdahl's Law to network architecture

Author here. I’m building a global AI platform where users are on conference WiFi trying to pull up digital business cards. Origin server in Oregon, users in London, Dubai, Sydney. This essay started as an internal architecture doc explaining why we moved to an edge-first pattern with Cloudflare Workers, and turned into a deeper exploration of why the Origin-Edge-Client model is the next major architectural shift. The core argument: TCP recovery time is dictated by RTT, so terminating connections at the edge doesn’t just save latency on the happy path — it fundamentally changes how fast you recover from packet loss. The essay also gets into why Amdahl’s Law is a better lens than Moore’s Law for systems design, and why that maps directly onto this pattern.