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Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

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Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#111

Post by pbreit »

zoul wrote: post #81
baxuz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't understand this fetishization of "serverless" functions. It leads to so much vendor lock-in, tooling complexity, and straight-up lack of features.

For me as a noob with very simple requirements, it’s very refreshing not having to care where and how my server code runs. Just add to a repo, push and forget. And if my code is written against some simple HTTP request interface, there shouldn’t be much trouble to move it elsewhere.

So, where do you host? What data store do you use?

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#112

Post by p1lonn »

kugelblitz wrote: post #83
adriand wrote: post #45

As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into this new name also hated the new name when they heard it. Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to p…

Yeah, a rebranding will always sound weird at first. The question is whether the upside is better in the long-term - time will tell. Vercel does sound good (though does sound close to parcel for me and also reads like vermicelli a bit). For "Zeit" I am biased, since I speak German and it translates to "time" (and there's a large circulation newspaper called "Zeit"... well, actually "Die Zeit" which reads funny in Eng…

Hmmm, perhaps they had a trademark issue in Germany? That explains a rebrand cleanly. Of course they did.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#113

Post by pier25 »

rymate1234 wrote: post #107
SnowingXIV wrote: post #89

I might be missing something. How does this compare with netlify which I've been using sometime as my 'heroku' for static sites? With that I'm also getting the ability to post-process things, use lambda functions, even get get forms for free (up to a point) which is needed for almost every site. It also provides slick DNS. Has worked wonders with gulp/jekyll/etc builds. This does seem to do all of that with the excep…

Main difference with Vercel / ZEIT is that unlike Netlify, it can more easily have SSR pages. So like if you're using NextJS for instance, on Netlify you can only really use the static site generation features of NextJS, whereas with Vercel you have SSR pages as well as the API functions. Also Vercel _can_ do full standard servers if needed, including for NodeJS https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advance…

But Netlify also has cloud functions, no?

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#114

Post by zoul »

pbreit wrote: post #111
zoul wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me as a noob with very simple requirements, it’s very refreshing not having to care where and how my server code runs. Just add to a repo, push and forget. And if my code is written against some simple HTTP request interface, there shouldn’t be much trouble to move it elsewhere.

So, where do you host? What data store do you use?

Last thing we needed was a simple unsubscribe service for a database hosted on AirTable, a few lines of code. It totally makes sense to me to host such glue on Now.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#115

Post by dfee »

baxuz wrote: post #68
sholladay wrote: post #50

I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1] [2] Fool me once... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...

I honestly don't understand this fetishization of "serverless" functions. It leads to so much vendor lock-in, tooling complexity, and straight-up lack of features.

You trade known deployment problems for unknown infra management problems. You reduce the complexity of contribution significantly.

If you’re at a company that wants to manage K8s, and you’ve chosen to invest in that direction, then serverless doesn’t make a lot of sense.

If your customers aren’t buying compute, then you should be wary of large investments that are outside your core focus.

Sure, there are quite a few problems with lambdas. But the abstraction you’re working at is much more atomic. And you don’t need FTEs to manage K8s and introduce a completely new set of problems.

Less is more (is the argument).

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#116

Post by JimTheDev »

simonw wrote: post #74
jeremiahlee wrote: post #11

I've been a customer for 3 years. `now` has felt like such a great evolution of the Heroku experience, which seemed to stop evolving after it got acquired by Salesforce. Zeit focused on all types of applications when it started, not just static frontend and FaaS. I wish it would return to supporting apps beyond JAMstack.

Python works great on Now once you figure out how to deploy it there. The lack of detailed documentation around Python does make me nervous that they may drop support for it some day though. My notes on running a Python app on Now v2: https://github.com/simonw/til/blob/master/zeit-now/python-as...

Yeah they had Go support and yanked it. I don't use go but was surprised. Seems like at times they are hoping to be all things to everyone and at times trying to be really focused (although we might disagree with where they are focusing).

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#117

Post by lewi »

snow_js wrote: post #109
sholladay wrote: post #50

I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1] [2] Fool me once... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...

Now v1 was such an awesome abstraction, I was inspired to recreate the CLI on top of Kubernetes, to avoid any vendor lock-in. I also needed v1 capabilities like websocket support that went away with the v2 lambdas. This CLI utility has support for a few major cloud Kubernetes providers. https://github.com/snowjs/cli

Oh damn. This is awesome, will have to give it a go.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#118

Post by mrkurt »

simonw wrote: post #74
jeremiahlee wrote: post #11

I've been a customer for 3 years. `now` has felt like such a great evolution of the Heroku experience, which seemed to stop evolving after it got acquired by Salesforce. Zeit focused on all types of applications when it started, not just static frontend and FaaS. I wish it would return to supporting apps beyond JAMstack.

Python works great on Now once you figure out how to deploy it there. The lack of detailed documentation around Python does make me nervous that they may drop support for it some day though. My notes on running a Python app on Now v2: https://github.com/simonw/til/blob/master/zeit-now/python-as...

Do one for fly.io! :D

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#119

Post by jkrems »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #67
adriand wrote: post #45

As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into this new name also hated the new name when they heard it. Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to p…

What value is there in renaming anything? You've said that out that "Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name." but you imply it doesn't matter - so what's the point? Isn't rebranding what companies do when they run out of ideas (one of my old employers changed its name at least 3 times because... why? I doubt they have a viable product yet. A name change isn't going to help).

Pure speculation but: "Zeit" is a super common German word. So if you want to protect your brand internationally but there's a major newspaper in one of the biggest economies that is also called exactly "Zeit" - that's kind of bad. Vercel is much more unique. You can't get https://twitter.com/zeit because it's the newspaper. You can't get zeit.de because it's the newspaper. You could get zeit.com but you'd compete with the newspaper for it. Picking a brand that doesn't have as much baggage could be convenient down the line.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#120

Post by wpietri »

baxuz wrote: post #68
sholladay wrote: post #50

I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1] [2] Fool me once... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...

I honestly don't understand this fetishization of "serverless" functions. It leads to so much vendor lock-in, tooling complexity, and straight-up lack of features.

I think there are legitimate use cases. E.g., I needed to help somebody with a little glue between Twilio and a SaaS tool. It was really nice to take a couple of functions, turn them into endpoints, and know that Amazon was going to worry about keeping them always available.

I agree it's so far wildly overblown, but I get that too. A lot of people are scared by ops, and "serverless" promises they don't have to think about it. For those of us comfortable with ops, even the name is an obvious lie. But for people who just have some code they want to run, getting it usefully deployed is still too hard.

Right now I feel like we're in a transitional era. The old model of individual single-purpose or multi-purpose servers is obviously inadequate. "Virtual server" is like "horseless carriage"; we know that the old paradigm is wrong, but we haven't found the new one. There are lots of contenders, but it seems like none of them have nailed it. The similar era for automobiles was circa 1900, where steam, electric, and internal combustion were all duking it out, with dozens of small manufacturers. I'll be very interested to see what we consolidate around.

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