5 ms·

Isn't Vercel pretty much just for Jamstack? Not everyone wants or needs that so I'm not sure it's better.

by danjac 6y ago

leerob 6y ago
Hey! Lee from Vercel here. Vercel isn't just for static sites – it also handles server-rendered applications, serverless functions, and hybrid frameworks (like Next.js). The current focus has been on an incredible front-end experience, but we're working to become a first-party integrator with your favorite backend solutions. For example, you can deploy a full-stack Next.js application with a PostgreSQL database in less than 3 minutes: https://twitter.com/leeerob/status/1351576575888797696 https://twitter.com/leeerob/status/1351576575888797696
- jopsen 6y ago
  Isn't serverless still just lambda..? Slow to boot, and subject to denial-of-wallet attacks. I do love vercel for static sites, and also think my blog with a minimal backend for comments is a good fit. But less sure how it'll hold up to even a single heroku dyno, which can do a lot of concurrent request at very low cost.
  - leerob 6y ago
    Cold boots are going away with innovations like Firecracker[1]. One of our larger customers was able to handle 90 million concurrent requests during peak traffic. [1]: https://www.serverless.com/blog/firecracker-what-means-serverless https://www.serverless.com/blog/firecracker-what-means-serve...
  - garethmcc 6y ago
    This is not entirely true. Firstly because Lambda keeps getting cheaper with the move from per 100ms billing to pwe 1ms being a big contributor. but also that I see organizations handling millions of requests per hour at peak but because of the dynamic nature of Lambda, any cost increase during the peaks are entirely offset by the reduced cost during low traffic periods since Lambda and associated services cost $0 when its doing nothing. Add in other services that act the same way such as S3, DynamoDB, API Gateway, etc and you have a very powerful, redundant and scalable applications without even really trying. No to mention that because spinning things out is so quick you can get a feature in front of users earning revenue way faster than any traditional service that requires some effort to start up, configure and maintain. And the costs associated with having VM's of the right size up to handle peak loads that are much slower to ramp up and down, creating significant periods of over provisioned capacity you pay for. Lambdas are not slow to boot because of the methods used to tune how hot they stay; in a production application doing millions of invocations a day we saw 0.03 % of all invocations suffering a cold start that added an additional 100ms latency only. And if you absolutly have to have warm Lambdas always for even that 0.03% you can use provisioned concurrency that always keeps a certain number of Lambda functions warm.
  - garethmcc 6y ago
    Oh yes, and serverless is not just Lambda, its a about the whole suite of cloud services you combine together to build your solution.
  - giorgioz 6y ago
    My personal experience with a B2B SaaS startup is that Vercel and AWS Lambda are much cheaper than Heroku. 0 to 4th year of the B2B SaaS startup we went from 1 free dyno to 3x 25$ a month dynos on Heroku for a total of 75USD a month. 4th to 8th year we switched to AWS Lambda and we have paid... 0$ since then. AWS Lambda free minutes are well enough to run a B2B SaaS until like 300 paying customers. AWS Lambda is also part of the serverless movement and it pairs up well with static sites on CDN. You can pre-render and/or generate a stic website for all the www landing pages and put them in S3 buckets cached with AWS CloudFront (Amazon CDN).
- bionhoward 6y ago
  I beat this horse to death, but I would definitely use it for if there was just a way to allowlist / vpc-peer so the functions can be the only thing talking to the database. Password isn't enough for a lot of applications. As long as vercel has lame security, I'll consider it a toy, nice for quick jokey blogs and stuff but not something to use for a serious project. Not about to risk getting sued just to use vercel simply because your stuff's easy to use
  - leerob 6y ago
    This is good feedback. Allowlist support is available for enterprise teams. We definitely hear you on VPC peering - it's on our roadmap. More on the security of our platform here https://vercel.com/security https://vercel.com/security, as well. Thank you!

Isn't Vercel pretty much just for Jamstack? Not everyone wants or needs that so I'm not sure it's better.

by danjac 6y ago

Isn't Vercel pretty much just for Jamstack? Not everyone wants or needs that so I'm not sure it's better.

Hey! Lee from Vercel here. Vercel isn't just for static sites – it also handles server-rendered applications, serverless functions, and hybrid frameworks (like Next.js). The current focus has been on an incredible front-end experience, but we're working to become a first-party integrator with your favorite backend solutions. For example, you can deploy a full-stack Next.js application with a PostgreSQL database in less than 3 minutes: https://twitter.com/leeerob/status/1351576575888797696 https://twitter.com/leeerob/status/1351576575888797696

jopsen 6y ago
Isn't serverless still just lambda..? Slow to boot, and subject to denial-of-wallet attacks. I do love vercel for static sites, and also think my blog with a minimal backend for comments is a good fit. But less sure how it'll hold up to even a single heroku dyno, which can do a lot of concurrent request at very low cost.
- leerob 6y ago
  Cold boots are going away with innovations like Firecracker[1]. One of our larger customers was able to handle 90 million concurrent requests during peak traffic. [1]: https://www.serverless.com/blog/firecracker-what-means-serverless https://www.serverless.com/blog/firecracker-what-means-serve...
- garethmcc 6y ago
  This is not entirely true. Firstly because Lambda keeps getting cheaper with the move from per 100ms billing to pwe 1ms being a big contributor. but also that I see organizations handling millions of requests per hour at peak but because of the dynamic nature of Lambda, any cost increase during the peaks are entirely offset by the reduced cost during low traffic periods since Lambda and associated services cost $0 when its doing nothing. Add in other services that act the same way such as S3, DynamoDB, API Gateway, etc and you have a very powerful, redundant and scalable applications without even really trying. No to mention that because spinning things out is so quick you can get a feature in front of users earning revenue way faster than any traditional service that requires some effort to start up, configure and maintain. And the costs associated with having VM's of the right size up to handle peak loads that are much slower to ramp up and down, creating significant periods of over provisioned capacity you pay for. Lambdas are not slow to boot because of the methods used to tune how hot they stay; in a production application doing millions of invocations a day we saw 0.03 % of all invocations suffering a cold start that added an additional 100ms latency only. And if you absolutly have to have warm Lambdas always for even that 0.03% you can use provisioned concurrency that always keeps a certain number of Lambda functions warm.
- garethmcc 6y ago
  Oh yes, and serverless is not just Lambda, its a about the whole suite of cloud services you combine together to build your solution.
- giorgioz 6y ago
  My personal experience with a B2B SaaS startup is that Vercel and AWS Lambda are much cheaper than Heroku. 0 to 4th year of the B2B SaaS startup we went from 1 free dyno to 3x 25$ a month dynos on Heroku for a total of 75USD a month. 4th to 8th year we switched to AWS Lambda and we have paid... 0$ since then. AWS Lambda free minutes are well enough to run a B2B SaaS until like 300 paying customers. AWS Lambda is also part of the serverless movement and it pairs up well with static sites on CDN. You can pre-render and/or generate a stic website for all the www landing pages and put them in S3 buckets cached with AWS CloudFront (Amazon CDN).
bionhoward 6y ago
I beat this horse to death, but I would definitely use it for if there was just a way to allowlist / vpc-peer so the functions can be the only thing talking to the database. Password isn't enough for a lot of applications. As long as vercel has lame security, I'll consider it a toy, nice for quick jokey blogs and stuff but not something to use for a serious project. Not about to risk getting sued just to use vercel simply because your stuff's easy to use
- leerob 6y ago
  This is good feedback. Allowlist support is available for enterprise teams. We definitely hear you on VPC peering - it's on our roadmap. More on the security of our platform here https://vercel.com/security https://vercel.com/security, as well. Thank you!