Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?
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.
They have a suite of complementary software products and services, including NextJS (a "batteries included" React framework with robust support for SSR and SSG), Now (hosting / CDN / runtime in "serverless" paradigm), Micro, etc.
World-class DX and remarkably powerful tools that somehow combine simplicity and flexibility.
No affiliation, just a longtime grateful fan.
FWIW I liked "Zeit" better than "Vercel" (shrug). But preferences aside, I was annoyed that the new redirects for "now.sh" URLs were -- uncharacteristically for a team famous for attention to detail -- mishandled, e.g. breaking a fantastic preso I'd bookmarked (which grauch used in his React Conf 2017 talks) and which I had cause to reference today in promoting NextJS with a client. It's the only real "footgun" move I've seen them make. Here's hoping it's an anomaly!
"Serveress" = you aren't managing a logical server
I.e. you don't need to concern yourself with provisioning, nor maintaining, a server as that part of the process has been abstracted away from you.
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.
Vercel(Frontend -> Serverless functions) -> DB
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.
I’ll be releasing my solution as a config wrapper (or offer as a PR for their Preact example) before I launch my site so other folks don’t need to go through the same process.
- 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.
In terms of actual hosting (removing the build/deployment pipeline), Vercel is a subset of AWS Lambda.
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.