Reading this post feels like nightmare and why should Vercel work for others? They are kind enough to notify others about incoming changes.
OpenNext, AWS Amplify, Cloudflare, Netlify can deploy next.js and the customers has no problem.
Netlify deploys hundreds of thousands of Next.js sites – here's what challenging
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Re: Netlify deploys hundreds of thousands of Next.js sites – here's what challenging
#12I think NextJS is still a decent framework to use, so long as you're not going into any of their RSC or other "full stack" features and use it with the "export" flag (which just generates HTML/CSS/JS that you can upload anywhere).
One thing that is very annoying is that their next/image component still does not support "export" and only works if you deploy to Vercel. Considering that Gatsby figured this out so early on is just shameful. Granted there are a couple of 3rd party packages that add proper image support like Gatsby had, it's still very annoying and quite frankly sad because we all know this is a business decision to keep folks locked into Vercel.
Re: Netlify deploys hundreds of thousands of Next.js sites – here's what challenging
#13"Fortunately, thanks to Vercel’s outreach, we’ve established lines of communication with the Next.js team. With this in place we hope to gain better insights into upcoming changes to the framework." So instead of having it in open, Netlify now have their own channel of communication with Vercel. This still continue to feel like a closed garden and makes it difficult for small vendors to have proper NextJS hosting. (D…
This is a great point and definitely something we're mindful of. That sentence actually ended with "and share these with the community" in the draft, but we can't make promises on behalf of the Next.js team.
Our hope is that the OpenNext initiative's growth and connections with the Next.js team is just a first step toward shifting some Next.js governance out to the open. The article calls out that the OpenNext members are hoping to contribute to public RFCs in the future, with Next.js core team collaboration.
Re: Netlify deploys hundreds of thousands of Next.js sites – here's what challenging
#14Worked at Netlify briefly, and the amount of plates they have to spin to keep all these integrations so smooth was super impressive. Some super impressive stuff under the hood. Also a lot of coordination between different projects. Shame to see Vercel not assisting with these efforts as other frameworks do.
Re: Netlify deploys hundreds of thousands of Next.js sites – here's what challenging
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
(disclaimer: I work at Netlify) It's not a 1:1 channel, we're pushing for as much work in the open as possible, and extending the OpenNext group to more members. IMHO one major challenge is the amount of work one has to do to build an adapter, if we can make the spec leaner and move logic out of e.g. the CacheHandler, that's gonna make it easier for you to create your own (or you could state that some features/modes…
Thank you for clarifying! There is a open source cache adapter but it does not support NextJS 15 at the moment.
Ooh, interesting. We didn't know about this. Is this it? https://github.com/caching-tools/next-shared-cache/tree/cana...
Re: Netlify deploys hundreds of thousands of Next.js sites – here's what challenging
#16> Here, “a Node.js server” refers to one Node.js server. A single, unique instance of a Node.js server (with or without Docker) with no horizontal scaling and no zero-downtime deploys is not a viable deployment strategy for serious projects.
Ah, the penny drops. The idea that you can’t run a traditional server and must rely on serverless vendor if you’re “serious”, and that NextJs is not convenient to Netlify, is at the core of this blog, camouflaged by concerns of openness. I’m most certainly agree with openness, and quite honestly I dislike NextJs and Vercel, but suggesting that side stepping lock in altogether by simplifying down to traditional techniques is not “serious” makes me bristle a little, especially when you say we can’t do something that we have been doing for many, many years without your platform.
Re: Netlify deploys hundreds of thousands of Next.js sites – here's what challenging
#17> Here, “a Node.js server” refers to one Node.js server. A single, unique instance of a Node.js server (with or without Docker) with no horizontal scaling and no zero-downtime deploys is not a viable deployment strategy for serious projects. Ah, the penny drops. The idea that you can’t run a traditional server and must rely on serverless vendor if you’re “serious”, and that NextJs is not convenient to Netlify, is at…
It's their whole business model, to convince developers that their walled garden is the only viable option. I've met a lot of newish developers that believe it too.
Re: Netlify deploys hundreds of thousands of Next.js sites – here's what challenging
#18> Here, “a Node.js server” refers to one Node.js server. A single, unique instance of a Node.js server (with or without Docker) with no horizontal scaling and no zero-downtime deploys is not a viable deployment strategy for serious projects. Ah, the penny drops. The idea that you can’t run a traditional server and must rely on serverless vendor if you’re “serious”, and that NextJs is not convenient to Netlify, is at…
The ability to self-host on serverless compute is just a subset of the challenges. Even with your own VPS or ECS setup, I think it's legitimate to say a serious project requires server redundancy, and as soon as you have more than one running server it opens up requirements to synchronize cache state, which is a significant challenge. This has nothing to do with serverless architecture.
Re: Netlify deploys hundreds of thousands of Next.js sites – here's what challenging
#19What's shocking to me is that they deploy "hundreds of thousands" of self-hosted apps? I wonder what percentage of overall NextJS apps are on Vercel, and what percentage aren't.
Re: Netlify deploys hundreds of thousands of Next.js sites – here's what challenging
#20> Here, “a Node.js server” refers to one Node.js server. A single, unique instance of a Node.js server (with or without Docker) with no horizontal scaling and no zero-downtime deploys is not a viable deployment strategy for serious projects. Ah, the penny drops. The idea that you can’t run a traditional server and must rely on serverless vendor if you’re “serious”, and that NextJs is not convenient to Netlify, is at…
> suggesting that side stepping lock in altogether by simplifying down to traditional techniques is not “serious” makes me bristle a little
This is a strawman. You're misinterpreting the word "serious". They are using it to mean scalable, not about unimportance/ability. At some point in the scaling process, it will be more effective to scale to another machine than stay on a single one at which point you need a lot of other primitives like the article mentions. E.g. a shared cache with proper invalidation mechanisms. If you dont need scale, then you're right, you dont have to worry about this. I will also note that it is slightly odd to use a framework like next.js if you arent (or planning on) running at scale because most of its features (e.g. SSR) are entirely performance oriented. Essentially, the whole point of the article is that despite being "open source" you cannot run next.js at scale yourself without a massive investment of your own.