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Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

Netlify and Vercel are frontend developer productivity and workflow tools. The value is not "CDN caching".

This. I consider Netlify and Vercel to be more focused versions of AWS for static site hosting. You can host a static site on AWS no problem, but AWS is so massive that a good chunk of your time is going to be spent just wrangling with the AWS services themselves.

What Netlify (and Vercel) did is take all those disparate features across AWS that you use for static site hosting, and package them up with a nice UI and easy access.

I know I'm nitpicking a bit here but it's more accurate to say that it's static HTML, JS, and CSS hosting. If you want to host images you have to solve that yourself. This part is pretty confusing to me given that both Vercel and Netlify have pretty much 1-click solved the rest of static site hosting.

For vercel you can't just throw the images in your `public/` folder or equivalent? I'm almost positive I've done that. Doesn't work for user generated images ofc, though cloudflare has some sort of solution there

basically do this for sites that are on Netlify too.

Agreed, it's a whole new git based workflow. When I was doing full stack applications 10 years ago, it looked similar in some ways, but it was a lot different to me. I also had to care much more about servers. CDN caching is just one feature.

Does it solve any problems which aren’t self-inflicted by the convoluted JS ecosystem and toolchain?

Yes.

https://i.imgur.com/PF7uxDY.png

What about end user experience?

Also yes. That screenshot doesn't have anything to do with Netlify, it's our own busted app release on our own servers. :D

Obviously but you’re in the same pool of “commit and magically deployed globally” service offering, except I think you’re actually providing value (deploying backend services alongside static content) as opposed to a commit hook and a cache update.

Yeah. I've used Netlify for a few years as a frontend guy and they're awesome.

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