March 2024 Summaries

Design Engineering is a growing role that combines aesthetic sensibility with technical skills. At Vercel, Design Engineers work across the company to deliver exceptional user experiences on the web. They collaborate closely with designers and engineers, contribute to branding, marketing, product development, and maintain the internal design system. The team values collaboration over process/tools and focuses on achieving results. Vercel is currently hiring Design Engineers who are curious, multidisciplinary, and passionate about creating delightful user experiences.

Demant, a prominent hearing healthcare and technology group, has successfully migrated to Vercel, achieving global scalability and 30x faster response times. The company overcame challenges with its existing web infrastructure by adopting a headless setup using Next.js and Vercel. This transition resulted in significant cost savings of 10x while improving the developer experience through increased agility and efficiency. Demant's new setup utilizes Sitecore as a headless CMS, integrated with a Next.js app extended with Sitecore's JSS SDK, leveraging Vercel features like Edge Middleware, Image Optimization, and Edge Cache to achieve remarkable performance improvements. The company has seen success in delivering faster, more responsive web experiences to its customers worldwide, while also driving innovation in the field of hearing healthcare.

The increasing popularity of AI applications has made them high-value targets for bots and bad actors aiming to exploit their computational resources. Vercel's industry-leading DDoS mitigation, including its recently launched Attack Challenge Mode, provides the first line of defense against these threats. However, additional protection is necessary to secure AI workloads from unauthorized use. Vercel and Kasada have partnered to lock down their AI SDK Playground, leveraging Next.js Middleware for enhanced security. By integrating Kasada's bot protection technology, they observed an immediate cessation of abusive activities on the platform. The implementation of a 1st-party-request-only protocol allowed them to intercept and block bot-driven API calls based on Kasada's bot classification. Kasada provides dynamic defense against automated threats with a platform that is quick to evolve, difficult to evade, and invisible to humans. The results of this collaboration have been impressive, with an immediate drop in bot traffic from 84% to negligible levels. As AI technologies continue to evolve, partnerships like these will be crucial for securing AI applications and ensuring a safe digital experience for users.

Ozone, a web-based video editing platform, has revolutionized the industry by embracing the web and leveraging Next.js and Vercel for its ultimate user experience. The platform's creators recognized the potential of accessibility, ease of updates, and democratization of tools inherent in the web environment. Initially hosted on Heroku, Ozone faced challenges with slow deployment times and frequent outages, which led to a switch to Vercel. This transformation resulted in faster deployment speeds, improved load times, and enhanced performance. Additionally, Vercel's developer experience workflow unlocked new possibilities for collaboration, empowering teams to work at their own pace and ship features more efficiently. Ozone has also begun incorporating AI functionality into its platform, enabling users to generate videos, images, music, and speech on the fly. The integration of Next.js and Vercel helped the team to accelerate development, enhance performance, and democratize the development process, positioning Ozone at the forefront of technological innovation in the industry.

Leonardo.ai leverages Next.js and Vercel to generate over 4.5 million images daily, merging AI with creativity across industries like gaming, marketing, and design. The platform empowers users to fine-tune AI models for customized assets, addressing challenges in development cycles, system stability, and performance at scale. With a switch to Vercel, Leonardo.ai reduced build times from 10 minutes to just 2 minutes, improved team efficiency through collaborative capabilities, enhanced monitoring, and focused on delivering superior caching functionality and an efficient content delivery network. The partnership with Vercel enables the platform to concentrate on creating new AI technologies and workflows that transform creative processes, ultimately improving user experience and empowering creators worldwide.

Personio, a leading HR solution for small and mid-sized organizations in Europe, successfully transitioned their WordPress monolith to a headless architecture using Vercel + Next.js, resulting in significant improvements to site performance, efficiency, and user experience. The new architecture addressed issues such as cumulative layout shift (CLS) and improved mobile performance, leading to a 29% improvement in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score on mobile devices. Additionally, the migration enhanced security by default with features like server-side rendering, static generation, automatic HTTPS, end-to-end encryption, and robust DDoS protection. The transition also upgraded the developer experience within Personio's team, streamlining internal processes and fostering a more collaborative environment, allowing for rapid implementation of new features and updates.

Leonardo.ai leverages Vercel to generate over 4.5 million images daily while navigating rapid growth and technical scalability challenges. The platform's shift to Vercel has transformed its workflow, cutting build times from 10 minutes to just 2 minutes and improving team efficiency through collaborative capabilities such as Preview Deployments. With Vercel Monitoring, Leonardo.ai can swiftly identify and resolve issues in serverless functions, reducing page load times by 95% and delivering a more responsive and reliable site. The partnership emphasizes Leonardo.ai's commitment to empowering creators and innovators worldwide with a robust and user-friendly platform.

Composable commerce offers numerous benefits, including storefronts that convert, better developer onboarding, faster deployment cycles, precision performance at a global scale, lightning-fast mobile shopping, freedom from vendor lock-in, flexible and data-driven experimentation, and deeper personalization. Monolithic ecommerce platforms can hinder these advantages, whereas composable solutions like Vercel and Next.js empower businesses to adapt quickly, innovate freely, and drive growth with agility and confidence. By adopting a composable commerce approach, businesses can unlock the full potential of their digital storefronts and stay ahead in the competitive ecommerce landscape.

The Vercel Toolbar now supports feature flag management from various providers such as Optimizely, LaunchDarkly, Statsig, Split, Hypertune, and more. This new feature allows developers to view and override feature flags directly from the toolbar, streamlining the workflow and reducing overhead. The integration works with any framework and can be added to local, preview, or production environments for improved QA and testing. By managing feature flags from the Vercel Toolbar, teams can ship better features faster and enhance trust in the release process.

Vercel has released AI SDK 3.0, which introduces Generative UI support and allows developers to stream React Components from Language Learning Models (LLMs) for richer user experiences. The new SDK enables the creation of more interactive and responsive applications without compromising performance. Developers can now associate LLM responses with streaming React Server Components, allowing them to retrieve live data and render custom UIs. This update simplifies how AI is integrated into apps, making it easier to build and maintain AI-powered features.