INTRODUCTION TO VERSEL

Vercel Inc., formerly Zeit is an American cloud platform as a service company. The company maintains the Next.js web development framework. Vercel is a specialist in cloud computing, with a focus on building Web applications. By encasing, combining, and wrapping infrastructure utilities from generalist cloud providers into a developer-centric computing solution, it provides a higher-order abstraction on top of such services.

Vercel's architecture is built around Jamstack, and deployments are handled through Git repositories.Vercel is the frontend development platform that gives innovators the speed and dependability they need to innovate at the moment of inspiration.

We help teams swiftly iterate while creating, previewing, and releasing great user experiences. Vercel seamlessly interfaces with your preferred headless content, commerce, or database and offers zero-configuration compatibility for 35+ frontend frameworks.

By providing the toolkit frontend teams love and delivering global edge infrastructure, Vercel unlocks developer potential and enables you to go from idea to global application in seconds. Vercel are the creators and maintainers of Next.js —the React framework for production.

Companies, teams, and individual developers using Vercel benefit from a fully-managed, highly-optimized experience that enables customers like Under Armour, Nintendo, The Washington Post, and Zapier to build delightful user experiences.Vercel helps users take advantage of best-in-class AWS infrastructure with zero configuration. Customers are transforming their digital presence through their frontend—and accelerating the world's adoption of serverless technology.

WHY VERCEL ?

Vercel offers developers a clear user interface and makes it easy to launch websites that are both quick and enjoyable for users. Additionally, it makes it simple for front-end teams to create lovely user experiences where performance is the norm, preview them, and then deploy them.

->Giving developers the tools they need to create a speedier Web is Vercel's goal in the world. There are two basic ways in which this concern with speed shows up in behaviour:

1.] Run Web applications at the quickest speeds possible with an auto-scalable, high-performance computing system.

2.]Make the greatest tools possible so that web developers can quickly build, deploy, preview, and ship web apps.

Additionally, both are linked. Developers may quickly go from writing code to actually deploying your Web application using Vercel's Deploy-Preview-Ship (DPS) cycle. You may do this by importing your project straight from GitHub or by starting from scratch using a template pulled from a library of various Web technologies.

VALUE OF VERCEL?

1.] Custom-built: You manage the whole technology and deployment process from beginning to end. To begin, you would need to create a complete build procedure that would allow you to separate, identify, and bundle the various parts of your web app. This is due to the fact that your SPA, SSG, and SSR components are each deployed independently on various kinds of cloud infrastructure. Then, in order to deploy such bundles into the appropriate cloud services, you would need to write a few lines of Terraform (or Pulumi, etc.) code. These include S3, Lambda, CloudFront, and API Gateway if you utilise AWS. Furthermore, even if those server-side computing resources are not your own, you still need to control their current state in this case.

2.]Buy a thing: Similar to the above, except you purchase it as a pre-integrated product from the market rather than building your own infrastructure-as-code programmes. I'm considering options like this community-created Terraform module or the Serverless Framework's Next.js plugin. Even if nothing in this situation is being built from scratch specifically for you, you still need to keep track of the serverless resources you have produced. Additionally, you must now completely rely on these frameworks in order to adjust to any prospective changes in standards and structure brought on by various Web technologies (e.g., changes in Next.js build).

3.] Subscribe to a service: You don't care how your components are bundled, where they are deployed, and how they are managed. Your infrastructure-as-code scripts are reduced to very few calls to a Deployment API with coarse-grained abstractions specifically designed for Web applications. Everything is given to you as a well-oiled build, deploy, and ship managed service where you only pay per user.

Vercel's cloud computing abstractions

1.]Serverless function:Backend programming languages are used to create serverless functions, which take an HTTP request and respond with a response. They are set up on Vercel's Edge Network, which runs many AWS Lambda instances across various locations.

2.]Edge function: With the exception of the fact that they are deployed at the edge using CloudFlare Workers, Edge Functions (in beta) are quite similar to Serverless Functions. These functionalities, in my opinion, can only be coded in Javascript and are carried out by the potent V8 runtime. For use cases like authentication, redirection, or A/B testing, Edge Functions also need you to provide a short piece of middleware that is performed before the request is completed.

HOW CAN VERCEL BE IMPROVED ?

Even if they are a highly valued business in the hypergrowth period as a whole, they still want an enterprise-grade clientele in order to expand naturally. They have all they need to prosper, but they must be mindful of inertia to prevent success from killing them.

How does Vercel feel about inertia? As I said previously, I don't believe Vercel is interested in emulating Heroku by offering all-encompassing features that cover the full development spectrum. They are, in my opinion, doing a really good job of concentrating on their goal of enabling a speedier Web and streamlining the SDLC for Web developers.