[adim86]

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?

[Jestar342]

Serverless web apps.

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.

[chrisweekly]

To be more precise: Vercel is the company (fka "Zeit").

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.

[benatkin]

Vercel is the company and the product. Now is the old name of the product. It's been thoroughly re-branded. If you go to now.sh it redirects to a page on vercel.com with no mention of "now". The command-line tool is "vercel", aliased to "vc", and it is configured in vercel.json (no longer now.json). If you go to GitHub and look at the repos containing with "now" in their name, they're archived or deprecated.

[chrisweekly]

Thanks, quite right. (I realized same too late to edit my comment.)

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!

[Rauchg]

Hey chrisweekly. "deck.now.sh" we chose to redirect because it had some very so slightly out-of-date information. Thanks for calling this out. The right thing here would be to add a banner to the presentation instead, giving an option to go visit the documentation or newer presentations.

[rbinv]

The term "serverless", to me, makes as much sense as "No Software" (Salesforce) did back then: none. I do get the point of "you're not managing any actual servers", but still.

[paxys]

"Cloud" = you aren't managing a physical server

"Serveress" = you aren't managing a logical server

[michaelbuckbee]

If it's helpful think of it as "less servers".

[mritchie712]

or "servers you don't manage / have to think about"

[jhpriestley]

or "servers you don't control / can't debug / pay extra for"

[yoz-y]

Just today I’ve heard an explanation: “you pay per request instead of per instance”.

[Jestar342]

Server-concern-less.

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.

[lock-free]

I think 'stateless' is better jargon that conveys what the servers can/can't do when rolling out a service using them.

[NationalPark]

You know what he's talking about though, seems like the word did its job fine.

[kd0amg]

Having had it explained to me later, yes, but when I first heard the term I thought it was a rebranding of standalone desktop applications rather than something that involves servers.

[adyus]

"Nacho server" (not your server) also works.

[tealpod]

Sounds better than misleading "serverless". Whoever named it as serverless deserves a Nobel price for confusion.

[sdan]

Vercel basically makes frontend dev super easy. You can literally type in "vc" in your terminal (after installing their cli) and it'll build and deploy everything you have locally in seconds (think React or Nextjs, a React framework).

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.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

Front end deployment, when done correctly, is already easy. S3 + Cloudfront and done: all your static assets are globally available everywhere with good response times in all major geographic areas.

[city17]

I switched from S3 + Cloudfront to Vercel, simply because it's even easier.

[earthboundkid]

For being "easy" it actually is quite hard to find documentation on how to run an S3 website with CloudFront "properly". Amazon makes it very confusing to figure out that, e.g., web server mode is different than regular S3 mode. CF itself tries to get you to do the wrong thing. Plus you have to jump through hoops to make your bucket private but still give CF access to it. I was doing that wrong for years. How many multimillion dollar companies wouldn't be relevant if Amazon just fixed their freaking docs?

[paulintrognon]

Where would those DBs be deployed? I mean, can vercel host DBs or do you still have to figure out a way of host them yourself?

[neurostimulant]

You're supposed to use other hosted database vendor or your own database server if you need it. I don't think they offer any database service.

[moeamaya]

What’s the recommended DB host? Does the Next community have a go to?

[theturtletalks]

I personally have Caprover running on a $5/month DigitalOcean droplet where I can create DBs on the fly for small projects. I normally switch to a better hosted platform for bigger projects. Heroku is also good but the free plan is 10,000 rows and the next plan is $9/m.

[dkryptr]

I don't think there's an official recommendation. Any database host will work just fine. However if you want to optimize based on location, here are the regions where Vercel hosts: https://vercel.com/docs/edge-network/regions#routing. So hosting a database in AWS in any of those regions probably makes the most sense.

[jpbow]

I've had success with FaunaDB, simple and cheap to get started and you get a GraphQL endpoint as well as their query language (FQL).

[sdan]

I use Heroku; gets the job done and is simple.

[sdan]

Yeah, you'd have to host them yourself. So suppose you have a basic webapp with users logged in a DB:

Vercel(Frontend -> Serverless functions) -> DB

[woile]

Is a tool to deploy frontends super easy. It's called JAMStack, but the main idea is make your life easier. I like it.

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

[bdickason]

I use it as a one line deploy tool for my personal sites. It’s incredibly simple / set-and-forget and supports custom domains, rollback, etc.

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.

[CyberRabbi]

I had the same question. I’m an experienced developer and I could not figure out the substance of what this product offers from a glance at its front page.

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.

[chrisweekly]

One of the major selling points of NextJS is precisely to address the issues with CSR (client-side rendering). It offers SSG (static site generation) for build-time rendering -- no client JS required. But also SSR (server-side rendering, ie at runtime), and automatic hydration for CSR too.

[wdb]

I just wished it wouldn't need all this __NEXT stuff which appears to lists all the possible routes/files.

[maelito]

React is just one lib used by Vercel

[eyelidlessness]

I’m using Preact X on a Next project and honestly it was more pain than I expected. Their Preact support is pinned to older versions with a different module structure.

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.

[eyelidlessness]

It’s several things that package well together, plus some payable value add for certain use cases.

- 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).

[tgdn]

With Vercel you can easily deploy a static/SSR app in minutes, either using their NextJS framework or any other JS/TS framework.

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.

[manigandham]

It's a PaaS service like Heroku and others. However it's the new generation of "serverless" billing models where you don't worry about instances/nodes/servers at all and pay in much finer-grained increments.

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

[seveibar]

Vercel is a serverless platform like AWS Lambda or Netlify. Run your API endpoints and your client application on it but your database elsewhere. They'll make deploying your website one command but take care of an enormous amount of developer operations, including dev/staging/production environments, secrets management, server scaling, and https certificates.

[madeofpalk]

Vercel is like Netlify, but I would not say it is "like AWS Lambda". Vercel a deployment + hosting platforms for static websites and "serverless" functions, but Lambda extends past what Vercel/Netlify is for.

In terms of actual hosting (removing the build/deployment pipeline), Vercel is a subset of AWS Lambda.

[ncrmro]

Next is a server side rendered framework for react apps.

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.

[bob33212]

Looks like hosting your site via your Git repo. Make a change in Git and they will push it to their servers ( probably AWS linux cluster)