The “not 13,000 km every time” framing is the right mental model for newcomers. What we keep teaching operators next is that an edge HIT is local to that PoP — freshness and purge still need a control plane when you run your own nodes. CDNCA is an open-source control plane for self-hosted CDN nodes plus a plugin marketplace; marketplace features roll out release by release. Did you measure TTFB before/after putting a cache in the path, or was the win mostly perceived smoothness?