Vercel Build Output API: Infrastructure-as-Filesystem | Hacker News Reader

Vercel Build Output API: Infrastructure-as-Filesystem

vercel.com

161 pointsleerob42 comments

Vercel never stops impressing me. They're shipping huge new features consistently every 3-6 months. The quality of their product (we're a user) is generally very high. Seemingly every startup I know (other than those creating core web tech) are using Vercel. Definitely a company to admire imo.

I wouldn't be surprised if Cloudflare or someone wanted to acquire them soon if they successfully pull off cross-language support. Heroku really fumbled the ball here, despite having a multi-year headstart.

Apparently they also built a bot (using Vercel functions) to track comments on HN re: Vercel, and yours got featured by the founder:

https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1550539397241548800

Will be open-sourcing this soon! Let me know if you're interested (lee at vercel.com).

Not that it wasn't possible before, but quick-deploy Slack bot opens the gates for spam upvoting/downvoting either from the employees or serves as an easy tool for marketers to spam replies about specific topics.

I think open-sourcing it wouldn't be beneficial. More work for @dang to moderate the content and feedback to remain organic.

HN already detects voting rings and responds with lower weights for the votes from the ring.

Good luck detecting that

How is Vercel different from something like DigitalOcean's App Platform?

I haven't tried Vercel, but with App Platform it seems like I get everything Vercel offers, but on top of that I can add managed databases, spaces, functions, and have overall more flexibility.

Vercel seems geared towards a specific stack / paradigm as far as I can tell while DO is more big cloud lite. i.e. build blocks like objective storage etc

I just wish there was a more affordable option. 20$ a month is steep for one repo is steep.

You can get pretty far on the free tier. But $20 a month for a superior dev experience is worth it imo.

Unless you want to password protect preview links. That’ll cost you an extra $150/month

They're also ridiculously good at hiring. So many of the top JS people are at Vercel.

> I wouldn't be surprised if Cloudflare or someone wanted to acquire them soon if they successfully pull off cross-language support.

I've also contemplated a Cloudflare acquisition or merger with Vercel several times. Some of their products compete with each other, but I think they target very different customers.

But maybe this is shifting as Vercel moves towards the back of the stack and Cloudflare moves towards the front.

I just ran this out of curiosity to see how Vercel runs Python applications these days - here's the code it generated, which runs some heuristics to check if your app is using WSGI, ASGI or a BaseHttpRequestHandler subclass: https://gist.github.com/simonw/8521ba3385279fde4a9878f2ad8d1...

I tried their Python Runtime Beta semi-recently out of similar curiosity.

I expected the base Python use case to support common Python function deploy setups, say Flask, FastAPI / Starlette, etc.

It didn't seem like that's actually possible (if it is, the docs should mention it!)... and instead this is "Advanced Usage".

I really don't consider Hello World running in Flask to be "Advanced Usage".

But the alternative with the verbosity of using BaseHTTPRequestHandler with no framework is just nuts. Of course, no one is doing that on other platforms.

Python is still a second-class citizen on Vercel.

Heroku made this smooth... a decade ago... I really don't understand why Vercel doesn't make a serious investment in Python. It would unlock so much more potential for their platform. [Vercel, my email is in bio if you're listening ;).]

If you're looking for a Heroku like experience, I've heard good things about fly.io.

I have been using Vercel with Python for a few years now, it’s pretty good! Be it Flask, FastAPI or Datasette, it does the job pretty well. I admit there were some rough edges when it was still called Now but Python is now officially supported.

Sending you an email. I'd like to improve our Python on Vercel docs (lee at vercel.com if anyone else has Python feedback).

I've run Starlette apps and Flask apps on Vercel just fine. I wrote some notes here that you might find useful: https://til.simonwillison.net/zeit-now/python-asgi-on-now-v2

Could this output format be used by others, to deploy to other platforms?

I currently use [1] to be able to deploy a nextjs app to AWS with API Gateway. Would be nice to have standard patterns for cloud deployments for mulitple frameworks.

[1] https://github.com/serverless-nextjs/serverless-next.js/blob...

This could turn into a standard across deployment platforms / companies. We'd need to abstract Vercel out (e.g. different folder names) and get feedback from others, but I would be open to it. Having a standard could help drive interoperability between web deployment platforms, which I think is good for the entire ecosystem.

I looked at FAB[1] to support this in the past, it would be great if it supported more platforms.

[1] https://fab.dev/

we're planning on doing this at https://sst.dev

What does Vercel offer that AWS Lambda and its other products already provide? I see Vercel has serverless functions but how does it compare to Lambda for instance?

edit: I see from reddit discussions it is initially cheaper but quickly gets even more expensive than AWS.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/ra1whm/bye_vercel_h...

Not having to deal with AWS is one major convenience. But with any of these kinds of services, you will end up paying a premium for the convenience.

what aspect of AWS is inconvenient here? IAM and VPC stuff just requires extra knowledge but once you understand it its not a hinderance that would get me shopping for a replacement.

that IAM and vpc stuff? imagine not having to know it to deploy your stuff.

imagine just having a repo of your web app, and just committing via git is enough to get it online, and scalable.

imagine not knowing IAM/VPC

imagine forgoing these knowledge because you are lazy only to pay it out of your pocket when you realize vercel's pricing is significantly larger for your employers.

its not going to be fun when your startup runs out of money and you can't afford vercel anymore.

This is kind of like the "why would I use Dropbox instead of cron+rsync" comment. There's lots things you have to do in AWS that have nothing to do with actually publishing your app. IAM, vpc, relevant vpc endpoints, secgroups/nacl, lambda, cloudwatch, cloudfront, API gateway, hopefully cloudformation/terraform, some wrapper for actually deploying the lambda, billing alerts, extra time because even though you know how to do this, it's easy to make trivial mistake that makes it not work.

Or... Just use vercel or similar packaged solution.

They’re worlds apart (I use both AWS and Vercel).

AWS has everything you could ever need, but that means you have a ton of trade offs to consider whenever you want to start something new.

I often want a one-off website deployed live on the internet to test something. For AWS I’m juggling in my head:

- Load Balancers

- API Gateway

- CloudFront

- S3 for static files

- Route 53

- Lambda config (or use Serverless to manage this or maybe ECS or EKS or maybe just spin up an EC2 instance…)

- Elastic beanstalk or Amplify instead of or in addition to the above?

- Cloudformation or Terraform to manage it? Or just build tech debt by doing it all manually?

- And how are we automating deployments? Maybe something custom in GitHub actions? I know AWS has some offerings here but they were cludgey last time I tried them.

Or with Vercel I:

- Type “vercel” and hit enter in the folder containing my web app.

They’re completely different worlds.

Sometimes I need the full power of AWS. Often I don’t.

all those things you described are a non issue if you use AWS Api gateway and Lambda. I'm struggling to understand why acknowledging these things is so much of a cognitive load for you.

In addition you can use Pulumi, Terraform, CDK but you could just do it from the web console and then generate those.

I don't know for me these are not enough of a pain for me to move off AWS.

Lemme put it this way. You know how people pay accountants to do their taxes or get a plumber to repair their sink? They can all be done theoretically by the user but it costs time to fix + time to learn about how to fix.

That's why people pay a premium for vercel(and other similar services like heroku) for hosting.

still not sold here. your analogy is misconstrued because those separate roles cannot be performed by one person in the first place whereas AWS is simply a matter of reading the documentation and building a knowledge of its architecture which compromises of many interconnected products. This is just how lot of enterprises function and AWS reflects this.

If you are starting out in AWS and you are overwhelmed its understandable but the if barrier to entry to Vercel is much lower you are not going to be differentiating yourself in the job market either.

The cost savings in the long run of having good AWS knowledge is always going to shine over whatever short term cognitive lift perceived by inexperienced AWS devs.

I would actually put Vercel in a lower tier of cloud practioners. For startups, that might be just what you need since there is a 99% chance you won't ever hit its unlimited tier limits (hyperbole).

In the time you've spent arguing about Vercel on here you could have actually tried it out and then you'd actually have your own opinion based on genuine experience.

I've used AWS Lambda professionally for years, Vercel is a totally different beast. I recently span-up a hobby project recently on Vercel rather than AWS Lambda (using Serverless Framework) to try out next.js and it took about 10 minutes to get it working whereas AWS Lambda would have taken a lot longer.

As an executive I need to carefully assess an offering by thinking of everything. Your reasoning is "shut up and use it". This is not how you convince c-suites.

If you've been really using Lambda on AWS and still struggling with IAM/VPC I would have to chalk this up as not amazon's fault

How does Vercel compare with Netlify, among others? I've used both recently but wanted to hear from everyone else.

The Browse All Templates → link on the Vercel homepage returns a 404:

https://vercel.com/new/templates

Hey, thanks for reporting this! Would love to know if there's a way I can reproduce this? We're currently in the process of rebuilding our Templates Marketplace so that could be why.

Thanks for the quick reply! I just clicked the Browse All Templates link on https://vercel.com/ but it's working now!

Gotcha! Thanks a lot for the headsup – I'll do some digging into it! :)

Never bet against Javascript!!!

I don't see a template for it, but can Vercel support a flat file CMS like Pico or Kirby? Something that writes to a text or markdown file?

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