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Vercel raise $40M Series B

vercel.com

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Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#41

Post by rbinv »

Jestar342 wrote: post #20
adim86 wrote: post #9

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?

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.

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.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#42

Post by madeofpalk »

tootie wrote: post #33
talolard wrote: post #2

Poor Gatsby. We run a Gatsby site, it was great to setup fast fast fast and has been a pain in the butt ever since. Next, from our limited experimentation, has much better ergonomics and it looks like the company has a stronger grasp on go to market. Crazy how fast that happened

Gatsby is a weird platform. It's gotten absolutely humongous for a product that is designed to only solve the simplest problems. Netlify has taken it to it's limit by adding redirects and lambdas. But it's still a platform for fancy brochures and blogs.

I agree with this weird mismatch of overcomplexity for the problem it's trying to solve. I did really like though the Gatsby model of ingesting all your source data into GraphQL and then having a standardised way to query and build pages from this. I wish Next.js would learn something from this.

I was using Next.js to build a staticly-generated website (so within the remit of Gatsby) but eventually i outgrew the limitations of static site generation (23k pages and counting...) it was so easy to switch to a traditional server-generated model with Next.js. I'm incredibly greatful for picking up and sticking with Next.js for this.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#43

Post by talolard »

naavis wrote: post #13
talolard wrote: post #2

Poor Gatsby. We run a Gatsby site, it was great to setup fast fast fast and has been a pain in the butt ever since. Next, from our limited experimentation, has much better ergonomics and it looks like the company has a stronger grasp on go to market. Crazy how fast that happened

Could you describe what kind of pain points have you had? I've been building a photo-intensive static personal website lately. I started off with Next.js, but later switched to Gatsby, because so many things just worked out-of-the-box with it. This was especially the case with optimizing and resizing images. For Gatsby there is gatsby-image, which works super well. For Next.js there is next-optimized-images which is…

Yeah, Gatsby-image was what drew us into the platform to begin with. That's what made it fast to get started.

I found the plugin system confusing, and poorly documented so it was hard to know how to get the most out of a plugin and adjust it to whatever our own funny use case was.

The graphql thing was annoying, we don't use graphql and don't know it and didn't find any advantage in having it around.

It's been a while since I touched it, but every time I need to a put it off because it's not a nice env to work in compared to our "from scratch" react apps

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#44

Post by woile »

adim86 wrote: post #9

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?

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

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#45

Post by [deleted] »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #37
naavis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The front-page is pretty unclear, but if you open the documentation page, it is fairly clear: https://vercel.com/docs > Vercel is a cloud platform for static sites and Serverless Functions that fits perfectly with your workflow. It enables developers to host Jamstack websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and requires no supervision, all with no configuration.

I still have no idea what it is after reading that blurb. AWS “fits perfectly” with my workflow so in concrete terms how is this different?

[deleted]

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#46

Post by sdan »

adim86 wrote: post #9

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?

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.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#47

Post by richeyryan »

leetrout wrote: post #26
nobody0 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can relate, next.js is more progressive while Gatsby get things done so quick at first, but you find yourself in a dark room of settings, let along GraphQL.

This happened to me. And the graphql proponents that know gql love it but it’s so slow to build. I love Hugo and I wish there was a middle ground that was more approachable. I might have to try next.

I setup my personal blog recently. Tried Gatsby and decided I didn't want to spend the time tweaking it so just used Hugo. Ended up deploying it on Vercel and its been so easy. I have less excuses for not writing blog posts now :)

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#48

Post by colinbartlett »

Glad to see this because we just started using Vercel for StatusGator.

Their API is great: we were able to automate deployments of branded status dashboards very quickly. There are some rough edges around domain name management but overall the experience is very developer-friendly, analogous to Heroku but for a different architecture.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#49

Post by michaelbuckbee »

rbinv wrote: post #41
Jestar342 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#50

Post by texasbigdata »

seveibar wrote: post #12

I'm a huge fan of vercel, it's saved me a lot of money[1] this year. Their developer experience is incredibly friendly and they've contributed extremely useful libraries to open-source, including micro and next.js. I've had great support experiences for some serious issues like platform bugs. They're in a tough position because the serverless paradigm is still foreign to many people, and many typical project dependen…

Could you talk more about your experience mentioned in [1]? That’s super material in terms of improvement.
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