[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[maelito]

React is just one lib used by Vercel

[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)