Methods, systems, and computer program products for programmatically determining whether components of a program are suitable for deployment in particular locations such as at the edge of a network. In preferred embodiments, program characteristics and operating environment characteristics, along with information about their interactions, are programmatically combined at deployment time to determine whether application components are edgeable. The disclosed approach enables people such as programmers (who are familiar with the program characteristics) and systems administrators (who are familiar with the operating environment characteristics) to each provide some control over the edgeability determination, along with other systems experts (who know how these features interact). Alternatively, this information or portions thereof may be supplied programmatically. Preferably, techniques of matrix algebra are used for the programmatic combination, yielding a value which is compared to a predetermined edgeability threshold to determine a particular component's edgeability.