Vercel raise $40M Series B

Don't think that's possible after raising such amounts of money. Their way out is now either getting aquired for loads of cash or going public. Going public also means loosing parts or all of your control over the company. Those investors will want to see their money back some time in the future.

I was a little disappointed, though, when they released the new Image component and it didn't seem to support AMP sites out of the box :(. I had to write my own wrapper function.

Mesosphere was started by Berkeley PhD interned at Google Borg. They worked on some exploratory project to expand the capabilities of Borg platform and wrote some paper.

Unfortunately, that project was on a slightly skewed direction of the technical trend. The philosophy and direction embodied in that project was neither useful inside Google, nor it matches the industry trend. But nonetheless an interesting improvement.

With the reputation of the group and relationship they decided to start a company.

And once docker is out, and kubernetrd next, in 2014 many have seen that mesos the technology is bound to irrelevance.

That prediction verified itself rather quickly, when mesosphere rebranded itself d2iq.

Using their own Next.js as an example: everything in /pages/ is client app, everything in /api/ is serverless app.

Client talks to the /api/ endpoints, /api/ endpoints talk to your domain services.

Vercel also provide edge-location hosting and caching.

You can also use their serverless functions; which add "backend" functionality to your existing frontends. You can deploy these serverless functions in a bunch of languages (see docs) but personally I've used them in Nextjs's baked-in functionality of api routes to basically add an endpoint for mutating/querying to/from my DB for example.

If you want to deploy a JS frontend (not just static files, though you can), this automatically handles a lot of things like SSR, SSL, etc https://vercel.com/pricing

For my simple sites it feels like hosting is just solved. Every time I rev my site I just push to git and I’m done.

It vaguely seemed like a replacement for react but it’s hard to believe you could raise $40M for that so something else must be going on. I generally was under the impression that the industry was moving away from client side rendering since it’s so slow. At least I browse the web with JavaScript off by default.

- they develop Next.js which is one of the two primary React-based solutions for static/server/client rendered websites (the other being Gatsby)

- they provide low friction deployment solutions for same (like heroku)

- they provide tools for specific markets attracted to one or both of the above, e.g. ecommerce

- probably a fair bit more, but those are their standout offerings

Worth noting that Next.js is a mix of custom offerings (they have their own solutions for things like static site generation and image optimization) and configurations for existing tools (a lot of what works well is a predefined set of Babel and Webpack configs, but they can be overridden unlike create-react-app, and there’s broad support for that).

It also provides serverless API endpoints capabilities with other languages (Python, Node, Go, Ruby). Most of this comes with a great free tier (including bandwidth which is unlimited).

Team accounts allow your team to collaborate, deploy, run analytics etc seamlessly.

It's great, they've done a great job. I might be forgetting a couple of things, but this is a big part of why they are so successful.

Basically node-js servers running your code with an integrated CDN, but they also support Go, Python and Ruby for running server-side logic.

Next is made by Vercel.

They also have an option to staticly rendered certain pages.

They netlify but for next. Also next usually requires a node server so technically can also act as an api.

Can generate a server less bundle.

For Gatsby there is gatsby-image, which works super well. For Next.js there is next-optimized-images which is not very mature. The latest version of Next.js also provides next/image, but as far as I have understood, it requires you to run the Next.js backend server, so it is not an option for 100% static websites.

https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/image-optimization

> Instead of optimizing images at build time, Next.js optimizes images on-demand, as users request them. Unlike static site generators and static-only solutions, your build times aren't increased, whether shipping 10 images or 10 million images.

Sometimes I also bumped into issues with Next.js where the framework was trying to send some code to run on the client browser instead of running it during page generation. The division between server and client seemed a bit too hazy for my taste and felt magical in the wrong ways.

My team has just started a Next.js app. I chose Next.js over Gatsby because on the face of it, Gatsby looked like a lot more configuration. I fully expect we'll "disagree" with Next.js at some point but for now I am really liking that it is opinionated, as it it letting us build really quickly.

After a quick look in the profiler I found that you're eager loading full-res images from shopify, and it's adding quite a bit of time before the page fully paints, with a lot of reflow. I'd recommend lazyloading them after the fact, with a super low res version as a background-image and adding a min-height to the images so that the whole page doesn't reflow as much.

Otherwise a great site and good looking products, If I had kids I'd buy a shirt.

Any gotchas when using Shopify as just the backend? Did you use the Nextjs e-commerce starter template?

re: hashicorp - jeff escalante their web team lead gave a talk on their move recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlNP3PSLT2Q

At that point, you're using customer growth as your primary metric to investors and thus raising money.

Just to elaborate on that, Vercel is awesome for stateless apps - specially front-end apps. Heroku excels on (small scale) statefull apps - like the back-end app connected to a database (add-on).

In my previous company we used both Vercel and Heroku, which was a great match. Both of them have Review Apps, for example.

https://nextjs.org/blog/incremental-adoption

This means you have zero server side rendering, you're just serving up static files, which of course is faster and can utilize CDNs and such.

SSR is also still possible, that would basically give you a classic model of fetching data on request and then rendering the page. My impression is that this is meant more as a transition than a preferred option.

The SSR features are also optimised to the point that the data fetching and rendering is decoupled. So a client side (JS) navigation only needs to fetch the new page's data. The DX around this is super smooth (just expose an async function...)

For commenting I'm experimenting with services like Fauna and Supabase

https://www.toolshero.com/communication-skills/ladder-of-abs...

YOU aren't the audience for this press release because the people they are trying to attract are more interested in abstract concepts than concrete ones. E.g. "I'm a great visionary CTO of a 100 person dev team and I use Vercel". A developer doesn't care that Vercel raised $40M, all they want to know is "if I push code to your stack, will it host my JAMstack".

NOW, I would argue that a good press release for a devchain based company can talk to BOTH audiences, and I think the criticism there is fair.

It was pretty easy to just click "Documentation" and see more: https://vercel.com/docs

> Vercel is a cloud platform for static sites and Serverless Functions that fits perfectly with your workflow. It enables developers to host Jamstack websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and requires no supervision, all with no configuration.

Seems fairly clear what it does.

Their only goal is to get someone high level in a big company feeling the sentence is cool so that he lets his email in the "get demo" page.

This is just normal enterprise sales, and this is probably why they managed to raise so much compared to most similar services. They really have a strong business focus and a sales team

One of the first sentences on the home once you read past the heading.

What are you even complaining about in this comment? You are complaining that you can't learn what a company does in a single sentence? Or are you claiming that vercel is a bullshit company (because it isn't)

Also, if you scroll down just a little bit in that page you learn exactly what vercel does.

I pushed a new proof of concept to Github yesterday and deployed it in literally 3 clicks on Vercel.

Please show how to do this with AWS.

Then take a look at the features like preview deployments, CDN, environment variables etc. Does your solution cover all of them with the same ease?

I think people are crazy to accept abstraction on the machine layer but keep reinventing the wheel for the infra in the middle. These services let's you focus on the actual product.

In the meantime you get faster, free hosting, better builds and spend zero time on ops.