May 2024 Summaries

Vercel Ship 2024, a second annual event celebrating frontend cloud technology, took place in New York City with nearly 1,000 attendees. The event highlighted new features and integrations aimed at enhancing iteration velocity for developers. These include improved platform and Next.js integrations for feature flags, the Vercel Firewall to protect against malicious traffic, and updates to the Vercel Toolbar. Additionally, the Next.js 15 Release Candidate was introduced with React 19 support, enhanced caching, and experimental features like Partial Prerendering. The event also showcased v0, a platform for generating React code from text prompts and images, and the AI SDK, a library for building AI-powered applications.

On Thursday, May 23rd, 2024, Vercel introduced new developer tools in the Vercel Toolbar to enhance collaboration and streamline development. These include accessibility, interaction timing, and Open Graph image tools, as well as the ability to use the toolbar in production. The Vercel Toolbar aims to improve user experience by automating CI/CD processes and offering a suite of tools designed for better collaboration and accessibility enhancement. New additions like the Accessibility tool, Open Graph tool, Interaction timing tool, and Toolbar in production extension are expected to further enhance developer and user experiences.

The Vercel Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a new security feature that adds an extra layer of defense against various web threats directly within the Vercel platform. It provides first-party security at the edge, reducing latency and ensuring only legitimate users access applications hosted on Vercel. The WAF offers customizable rules engine, framework-aware rules, managed rulesets, observability, rate limiting (beta), instant propagation, and instant rollback features for comprehensive protection. This new feature is part of Vercel's commitment to building a web that is secure by default, leveraging its unique framework-defined infrastructure (FdI) and inherent understanding of applications.

The text discusses the integration of feature flags in Vercel's workflow, aiming to improve collaboration and accelerate development cycles. Feature flags help teams release with confidence, safely roll out changes, and test efficiently. Vercel has introduced a platform-wide understanding of feature flags and an experimental Next.js design pattern. The integration includes the ability to override feature flags directly from the Vercel Toolbar, improving workflows for companies like Notion and Leonardo.ai. Furthermore, the integration with the DX Platform allows filtering and breaking down site's page views and custom analytics events by feature flags, helping teams gain a deeper understanding of how their flags will impact users. The text also introduces a new design pattern that implements server-side experimentation for Next.js in @vercel/flags/next package, aiming to eliminate layout shifts and jank typically caused by client-side experimentation.

In this blog post, the author discusses securing data in Next.js applications using Okta and OpenFGA. The post highlights the importance of maintaining data security as modern applications become more complex with large codebases operating across multiple environments. It introduces the concept of a Data Access Layer (DAL) to centralize authentication and authorization checks, making it easier to maintain data security in Next.js applications. The post also explains the differences between confidential and public environments, as well as server and client components in Next.js applications. It emphasizes the need for double-checking actions from the browser when interacting with a confidential environment like a server. Additionally, the author introduces fine-grained authorization using relationship-based access control (ReBAC) and demonstrates how to implement it using OpenFGA in a Next.js application. The post provides an example of adding an authorization check for each action within the Data Access Layer and discusses error handling strategies. In conclusion, centralizing data operations within a DAL simplifies authentication and authorization checks, allowing developers to build secure and scalable Next.js applications.

Vercel is helping businesses add AI features to their apps without requiring dedicated AI teams, thanks to advancements in large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT, Google's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude. Pretrained mastery, adaptability, creative output, understanding beyond keywords, multilingual reach, and prerequisites such as frontend frameworks and infrastructure handling are key benefits of integrating LLMs into apps. AI features can improve businesses by offering semantic search, natural chatbots, nuanced personalization, instant localization, automatic content generation, developer efficiency, and private data analysis. Businesses can start simple with Vercel's AI Playground to interact with popular LLMs, collaborate on low-stakes prototypes with the DX Platform, or explore more possibilities with dedicated sales experts and engineers.

Desenio, a leading affordable art provider, partnered with Vercel to modernize their application architecture and improve their entire process after the merger of two companies gave them an opportunity to restructure their monolithic approach. With Vercel, they transitioned from duplicate pipelines to a unified workflow, resulting in faster builds, improved site performance, and increased conversions. The platform's features, such as Preview Deployments, Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), and Next.js Redirects, enabled the Desenio team to iterate quickly, collaborate with stakeholders, and improve their accessibility scores. By leveraging Vercel, Desenio was able to launch 30 new markets in just one month, further solidifying their position as a leading global distributor of wall art.

Vercel Functions have been optimized to run faster and are now powered by Rust. The new system has already served billions of invocations, resulting in faster executions and slightly lower costs. With the migration to Rust, Vercel Functions have seen a 30% improvement in cold start times for smaller workloads and an average of 80ms faster execution time for larger workloads. The move to Rust has also improved streaming response times by 47%. These improvements will soon be available to all customers, with further performance enhancements planned for the future.

Dub, an open-source link management platform, has grown to 3,000 active domains with Vercel's multi-tenant SaaS toolkit. Dub's growth rate is remarkable at 25% month-over-month, and it now serves over 5 million redirects per month. Vercel simplified the complexity of domain management by providing a powerful API that allowed Dub to efficiently manage custom domains from the outset. This simplification enabled Dub to focus on innovation rather than backend complexities, while also removing significant barriers associated with SSL management, allowing for cost-effective and high-security solutions.

Vercel has released AI SDK 3.1, which includes ModelFusion joining their team. This release brings them closer to delivering a complete TypeScript framework for building AI applications. The AI SDK is organized into three main parts: AI SDK Core, AI SDK UI, and AI SDK RSC. AI SDK Core provides a unified API for generating text, structured objects, and tool calls with large language models (LLMs). AI SDK UI offers framework-agnostic hooks for quickly building chat interfaces. Lastly, AI SDK RSC is a library to stream generative user interfaces with React Server Components (RSC). The release also includes support for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and Mistral model providers.

Vercel, a platform for hosting websites and applications, now supports compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for its enterprise customers. This enables healthcare organizations to leverage Vercel's Frontend Cloud while maintaining industry-specific regulations. Vercel is considered a business associate for healthcare customers, requiring it to comply with certain HIPAA obligations. The company underwent an independent third-party audit to ensure support for compliance with the HIPAA Security Rule and HITECH Breach Notification Requirements. This achievement reaffirms Vercel's dedication to providing a secure and reliable platform for businesses across all industries, including healthcare.