Vercel: Develop, Preview, Ship

What is Vercel?

Vercel is a unified cloud platform that enables developers to deploy, manage and scale their applications and websites. Vercel provides a wide range of features, such as automated deployments, custom domains and a powerful CLI. It also offers a wide range of integrations with popular services such as GitHub, Slack and Zapier. 

The Frontend

Frontend web development, also known as client-side development, is the practice of producing HTML, CSS and JavaScript for a website or web application in a way that a user can view and interact with directly. The challenge associated with frontend development is that the tools and techniques used to create a website are constantly changing, so the developer needs to keep up with the evolution of new technologies and tools that are introduced in this field. 

Vercel is a platform for frontend developers to build, deploy and share their projects with the world. It is designed to facilitate and accelerate the move from concept to production. 

Vercel ideal for frontend development teams

Vercel is an attractive option for frontend development teams because of its unified workflow for development, testing and deployment, and provides tools to assist with testing and debugging. 

Its cloud platform facilitates the scalability and deployment of projects, making it an ideal choice for teams that need to manage multiple projects.  The variety of tools offered by Vercel focus on performance, speed and scalability to help developers create faster and more secure web applications. 

By using Vercel, teams are guaranteeing savings in time and energy, and concentrating on creating a great end product.

A seamless workflow.

Vercel presents itself as an excellent workflow tool for developers because it simplifies the development process. Vercel's workflow is based on a "zero configuration" philosophy, which means that it requires minimal installation and setup. This not only makes it easier for developers to get up and running quickly, but also means less hassle throughout the development process.

Vercel also provides developers with an integrated platform for building, deploying and managing modern web applications. This platform includes a powerful and robust hosting environment that supports multiple languages and frameworks, as well as a set of tools and APIs to help build, distribute and deploy applications efficiently. It also provides a powerful CI/CD pipeline, which helps automate the process of building, testing and deploying applications.  

It provides the ability to easily access and manage applications from a single location, saving time and effort. In addition, Vercel offers a complete monitoring and logging solution that allows developers to quickly identify and fix potential issues within their apps. The platform has an intuitive and streamlined user interface, making it easy for developers to understand the platform and work methodology. 

How do deployments work with Vercel?

Deployments are a way for developers to quickly and seamlessly push changes to their applications and websites to the servers or environments where they run.

With Vercel, deployments are created with a single command and can be instantly previewed at the URL. Vercel automates and simplifies the application deployment process with its unified platform, allowing developers to build, preview and deploy their applications without having to manually configure servers and other infrastructure. Vercel uses a git-based workflow and integrates with popular version control systems such as GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket. This makes it easy to track deployments and make changes to your applications.

In addition, Vercel provides a reliable way to deploy applications and websites with no downtime and no configuration required. It is ideal for hosting static sites, single-page applications (SPAs), serverless functions, and more. Vercel guarantees efficient deployments, taking only a few seconds to deploy and are automatically configured with the best settings for the project. This guarantees a quick start-up. It also provides atomic deployments, which means that when deployed, changes are applied to all servers at the same time. This ensures that your application is always up and running and that there is no downtime. 

With its robust hosting platform with multiple levels of redundancy, it ensures developers that their application is always up and running. 

Next.Js: The most widely used framework

NEXT.JS is an open source JavaScript framework based on React that allows developers to create high-performance, SEO-friendly and maintainable React applications.  

It offers a great combination of features that make it a great choice for building modern web applications. 

Upgrades without redeployment.

One of the main advantages of Next.js is that updates and improvements can be made without the need to re-deploy. This is possible because Next.js uses intelligent caching and preview rendering, which means that changes to the code are visible as soon as they are saved. Because of these features, Next.js allows developers to make agile, interactive changes without the need to deploy a new version of the application, reducing downtime, reducing costs and enabling faster updates to improve the user experience.

At the same time, this flagship framework also provides a modern JavaScript stack, allowing developers to use the latest features and technologies while maintaining compatibility with older browsers.

Faster construction 

Next.js provides a powerful rendering system that allows developers to render their applications on both the server and the client. This helps improve page load times and ensures that users receive the most up-to-date version. In addition, the Next.js rendering system also ensures that pages render the same way across all browsers and devices, resulting in a consistent user experience.

One advantage of Next.js is that it eliminates the need for complex build configuration by providing an optimised, out-of-the-box framework for server-rendered React applications. The framework comes with a built-in development server and hot reloading, allowing for a dynamic development cycle.

With its integrated routing and code splitting, Next.js makes it easy to create production-ready applications. This eliminates the need for complex configuration and/or setup. The advantages of using Next.js include faster development cycles, easier routing and improved performance.

Centralised information, streamlined interactions

Next.js provides a centralised structure for application development, making it easy for developers to add features or make changes. This is because all the necessary components are stored together, allowing developers to find the information they need in one place. This centralised structure also allows for the reuse of components, which reduces development time as they are easy to find and identify. By keeping components together, the application can load quickly and efficiently, resulting in a faster response time, which is beneficial to the user experience. Components load in a predictable manner, which in addition to speed also leads to consistency in timing. This consistency ensures that users have a positive experience while using the application.

Overall, with its intuitive and powerful tools, Next.js makes it easy for developers to create modern, high-performance web applications, while at the same time positively enhancing the user experience.

Advantages of Vercel

Vercel is a platform that offers unmatched scalability and performance, making it the perfect choice for any developer looking to create the next generation of web applications. Vercel also offers a wide range of services to help developers get the most out of their process.

The Low-code 

One of Vercel's most powerful features is its Low-code platform.  Low-code is a form of programming that allows developers to easily create applications with minimal coding effort. 

Low-code platforms allow developers to visually design and develop their applications by adding pre-built components and dragging and dropping them into the application. 

This library of pre-built components also enables the creation of powerful, feature-rich applications. This makes it much easier for developers to bring their ideas to life and create applications at greater speed, with minimal coding effort.

An Edge network of its own 

Vercel's Edge Network is a powerful global content delivery network (CDN) designed to deliver content quickly and securely to users around the world. The network is designed to handle more than 1.2 billion requests per second and is based on a powerful set of technologies such as Anycast, DNS and HTTP/2. It is also optimised for performance, reliability and scalability. In addition, it is designed to be highly secure, ensuring the protection of user data.

Aside from scalability and security benefits, Vercel's Edge network also offers improved performance. With excellent optimisation for caching and compression, it helps reduce latency and improve page load times. By relying on a distributed architecture, it ensures that content is always delivered from the closest possible network.

It is an ideal option for those looking for a powerful and secure way to deliver content to users around the world.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

 One of Vercel's key advantages is its continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capability, which allows developers to deploy their web applications efficiently.

CI/CD pipelines allow you to automate web application deployment processes, helping to minimise manual errors and save time. It also helps ensure that code is always up to date and ready for production. With Vercel, developers can set up their CI/CD pipelines in minutes and start building, testing and deploying their applications.

Powerful APIs and webhooks, which easily integrate with external services, automate the deployment process, ensuring that applications are always up to date.

CLI Turborepo 

CLI Turborepo is an open source command line interface (CLI) tool for Vercel. It is designed to be easy to use and help developers quickly deploy their websites and applications on Vercel with minimal effort. With Turborepo CLI, developers can create, update and delete projects, manage their environments and keep their resources up to date.

CLI Turborepo simplifies the deployment process and allows developers to implement their projects on the platform. Being open source, it allows developers to contribute to the development of CLI Turborepo to make it even more powerful. In addition, it is easy to use and requires minimal configuration, making it perfect for developers new to the platform.

Vercel vs. Netlify vs. Heroku 

Comparing web hosting solutions can be tricky, but there are three key players in the market that stand out: Vercel, Netlify and Heroku. All three services offer reliable hosting, but each comes with different features and benefits that make them suitable depending on the needs of each project.   

Netlify and Vercel appear to have many similar features, but in reality they differ slightly. Both platforms offer global CDN, serverless functions, CI/CD and DNS management. On the one hand, Vercel offers a wide variety of integrations and features, such as automatic performance optimisation, zero-configuration serverless functions and an integrated development environment, while Netlify provides greater flexibility with manual control and customisation.

As far as serverless functions are concerned, both platforms are powered by AWS Lambda, which means you don't need an AWS account, but you will definitely need to use a programming language to create the code because it has to run server-side logic. One of the advantages of Vercel is that it extends this even further by supporting Python and Ruby. 

Regarding workflows, both platforms use Git as a source to get your project. They get your source files from servers like GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket. After logging in, you can choose the repository for the connection, and the default configuration will conveniently run the whole deployment pipeline.  So in this matter both platforms work very similarly. However, while Netlify struggles to provide Server-Side Rendering (SSR), Vercel makes it possible to deploy SSR in Next.js applications quickly...   

Heroku is a cloud platform for the deployment and automation of applications, while Vercel is a cloud platform for the deployment of static sites and serverless functions.

Vercel focuses more on static sites and serverless functions, with features such as atomic deployments and zero configuration. This gives Vercel a considerable advantage over Heroku.  Vercel also offers serverless backend services that allow the developer to worry only about writing backend code and not about deployment or server maintenance.

Ultimately it is entirely at the user's discretion to decide which serverless deployment platform they wish to use. Vercel is definitely a better choice if a project was developed with Next.js and requires CLI power. All three platforms support caching, however, as we said earlier Vercel does better if you require it for serverless functions. Therefore, although it mainly depends on the needs of your project, Vercel stands out as a platform for collaboration.  

Vercel and Aplyca

We specialise in cloud technology development and consultancy, helping you to create optimal digital experiences for your customers. 

We invite you to learn more about our partnership with Vercel that empowers and strengthens the implementation of digital solutions in the market.

If your company is interested in implementing projects or improving the digital experience with technologies such as Vercel,please contact us.