Unleash Enterprise Edge is a lightweight caching layer designed to improve scalability, performance, and resilience. It sits between your application SDKs and the Unleash API, functioning as a read replica that can handle thousands of connected SDKs without increasing the read load on your primary Unleash instance.
Beyond scalability, Unleash Edge offers significant privacy and security benefits. It evaluates feature flags for frontend SDKs directly on the Edge node, ensuring that sensitive user data required for evaluation is never sent upstream to Unleash.
Unleash Edge supports streaming, a persistent connection between Edge and Unleash where configuration changes in Unleash are pushed to Edge nodes immediately, ensuring your feature flags are always up to date without the network overhead of frequent polling.
Edge supports both frontend SDKs and backend SDKs and has multi-environment and project awareness. You can daisy-chain Edge instances to support more complex setups, such as multi-cloud deployments.
Key features:
Unleash Edge Enterprise is available as hosted or self-hosted, see Hosting options for a detailed comparison.
Edge sits between your SDKs and Unleash, serving flag data from an in-memory cache with sub-millisecond latency. The cache stays synchronized with Unleash either through periodic polling or real-time streaming.
Edge evaluates feature flags locally. This means user data (PII) used for targeting rules (like user IDs, emails, or IPs) is processed within the Edge node and never sent to the Unleash Cloud or your upstream instance.
Edge also aggregates usage metrics from connected SDKs and sends them upstream to Unleash.
Backend SDKs fetch the full feature flag configuration from Edge and evaluate flags locally using activation strategies.
Frontend SDKs send evaluation requests to Edge, which evaluates flags server-side and returns only the results.
By default, Edge keeps its cache in sync with Unleash by polling the upstream API at a fixed interval. With streaming enabled, Edge opens a persistent connection to Unleash and receives feature flag changes as they happen. This reduces replication lag between Unleash and Edge from the polling interval to near real time.
When streaming is enabled, Edge first synchronizes its cache from Unleash and then maintains a persistent connection for live updates. If the connection drops, Edge reconnects automatically and continues from the latest known state. During reconnection, Edge continues serving cached data to connected SDKs.
Enabling streaming changes how Edge receives updates from Unleash, but it does not change how SDKs connect to Edge. SDKs continue to use the existing client and frontend endpoints.
Streaming is available on the Enterprise Edge build with an Unleash Enterprise instance. For self-hosted Unleash, your license must include Edge streaming. For setup, monitoring, and troubleshooting, see Configure streaming.
Enterprise Edge hosted is a fully managed service operated by Unleash. It is ideal for teams requiring globally low latency and high resilience without the added operational overhead.
Enterprise Edge hosted is available in the following data centers:
US:
Europe:
Asia:
Canada:
South America:
Enterprise Edge self-hosted is hosted and operated by you within your own infrastructure. It is designed for environments requiring strict control, such as air-gapped networks or privacy-sensitive setups.
For more information on how to configure and deploy self-hosted Unleash Edge, go to Deploy Unleash Edge.
To use Enterprise Edge hosted, contact your customer success representative to enable Enterprise Edge in your account. Once Unleash configures Edge in your account, you can update your SDK configuration to use the Edge URL provided.
To use Enterprise Edge self-hosted, you must request a license key from your customer success representative. Self-hosted Edge requires deployment and configuration on your infrastructure.
See:
Unleash provides deep visibility into the health and performance of your Unleash Edge nodes directly within the Admin UI.
Go to Admin settings > Enterprise Edge to visualize your Edge topology. This view allows you to monitor the real-time state of every connected Edge instance.
The dashboard reports the following metrics for each Edge node:
Instance details: Region, instance ID, upstream server, and hosting type (hosted or self-hosted).
Instance health:
Connected).Traffic and performance:
These metrics help you identify bottlenecks, verify regional deployments, and ensure your Edge nodes are properly synced.
To better support customers operating at scale, we are shifting our development focus to Enterprise Edge
We recommend all OSS Edge users migrate to an Enterprise plan with access to Unleash Edge Enterprise.