May 2023 Summaries

Today marks a significant milestone for frontend development, as May 29th is the 10th anniversary of React, a project that has transformed the web industry and reshaped the way we build digital experiences. The true strength of React lies in its versatility, making it more than just a library, but a platform that powers countless pieces of software across the web and beyond. Vercel supports developers on their journey to build better web experiences, while React holds a special place in their heart, having shaped the understanding of UI, inspired the creation of Next.js, and continues to inspire innovation and transformation.

Vercel and Sanity have announced a strategic partnership to help businesses future-proof their digital experiences without sacrificing content creativity or iteration velocity. The partnership combines Vercel's Frontend Cloud with Sanity's Composable Content Cloud, enabling developers to create at the moment of inspiration and challenge the status quo through joint innovation. With this collaboration, companies can enjoy measurable metrics such as page load speed and time-to-first-byte, as well as intangible team collaboration improvements. The joint solution includes tools like Vercel + Sanity templates, Visual Editing, and Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), which enable businesses to build dynamic user experiences that convert without sacrificing content creativity or iteration velocity. By decoupling the frontend and backend, companies can remove limitations set by monolithic platforms and free up developers to build optimal developer workflows for the fastest release velocity and peak user experience. The partnership is already being used by companies like Loom, which has seen improved scalability and collaboration thanks to Vercel and Sanity's joint solution.

Vercel is a frontend-as-a-service product that makes it easy for engineers to deploy and run the user-facing parts of their applications, allowing teams to deploy their frontends independently from their backends. Vercel provides features like deploy previews, functions as a service, analytics, and more, making it easier to build and deploy modern web applications. The company also owns and maintains Next.js, a popular React-specific web framework, and has released supporting features to make its frontend cloud a legitimate place to build entire applications, including Edge Functions for serverless backend code, analytics, CLI/API interactions, and storage/databases. Vercel's focus on the frontend and abstraction of the backend positions it as a frontend cloud, providing managed infrastructure for developers to build faster.

Nuxt.js is now fully integrated with Vercel, allowing for seamless support of various features such as Vercel KV integration with Nitro Storage, full static support, and incremental Static Revalidation. This partnership enables Nuxt developers to leverage Vercel's powerful tools and performance enhancements, making it a leading choice for building modern serverless applications. With the integration, users can now set up a cache with durable storage for their Nuxt application in just a few lines of configuration, and choose from different rendering strategies for optimal page loading. The partnership also includes support for other Vercel products such as Functions, Middleware, Image Optimization, and more.

Clerk, an authentication provider, is reimagining authentication for the frontend cloud, which prioritizes performance over traditional backend architecture. By leveraging edge-native auth, Clerk enables faster app development, better user experiences, and powerful composability through its use of framework-specific SDKs, JSON web tokens (JWTs), and stateless session management. This approach streamlines developer experience, reduces regulatory burden, and empowers developers to create secure, efficient, and user-friendly applications that take advantage of the frontend cloud's edge compute capabilities.

Vercel Spaces is a new feature that aims to help teams scale their codebases efficiently while retaining quality, by providing a powerful toolset and conventions to integrate with monorepo setups. The Vercel Spaces Dashboard surfaces information about the codebase and development workflows to developers, making it easier for them to collaborate and improve productivity. Additionally, Conformance automates detection of critical issues in frontend code early in the development lifecycle, preventing errors from reaching production. Code Owners helps teams collaborate better by making it easy to find who is responsible for a given piece of code and ensure that code changes are reviewed by the right people. Vercel Runs offers an interactive UI for debugging builds and stores historical build logs, allowing users to easily look back at past runs or view aggregate insights. With these features, teams can move fast without breaking things, making quick updates while retaining great performance, security, and accessibility.

Vercel is bringing collaborative content editing to its Preview Deployment interface with the launch of Visual Editing, a feature developed in partnership with Sanity, the composable content cloud. This innovation enables users to visually edit content and experience faster iteration, regardless of their role or expertise. With Visual Editing, developers can directly edit content on their site without needing to open the CMS dashboard, while also synchronizing changes back to their headless CMS. The feature is currently in a limited private beta for Enterprise Teams using Sanity as their content editing workflow, with plans to expand its accessibility and support for other CMS providers in the future.

Vercel is introducing new security features, including Secure Compute and Firewall, to enhance protection of applications and infrastructure. These features provide private connections, DDoS mitigation, IP blocking, seamless authentication, and secure connections. Vercel also offers a comprehensive monitoring solution to provide actionable insights into application behavior, performance, and security. The company aims to empower organizations to build and deploy with confidence, creating secure, performant, and resilient web applications that deliver exceptional experiences to users.

Today, Vercel is announcing a suite of serverless storage solutions, including Vercel KV for key-value stores like Redis, Vercel Postgres for SQL databases, and Vercel Blob for easy file storage at the edge. These solutions are designed to be open, easy to use, and scale as efficiently as Vercel's frontends. The need for performance and personalization is driving a shift towards server-first and edge-first architectures, making these new solutions ideal for building on the web. With Vercel KV, developers can create Redis-compatible databases that persist in memory and on disk by default, while Vercel Postgres provides a fully managed, highly scalable SQL database built for the frontend cloud. Vercel Blob offers an effortless yet powerful storage API built entirely on top of web standards, making it easy to store files at the edge. These new solutions build on Vercel's existing integrations with database partners and make it easy for developers to manage their frontend storage needs without worrying about infrastructure.