Introducing Skew Protection

Vercel is introducing Skew Protection, a novel mechanism to eliminate version skew between web clients and servers. Version skew occurs when two components of a software system communicate with different versions, leading to potential problems. With Skew Protection, applications are bound to the original version that generated them, ensuring that clients loaded with an old field name talk to servers with the same version that knows how to handle it. This feature is available as an experimental feature in Next.js and will reduce errors users observe during new deployments, increasing developer productivity. However, Skew Protection does not eliminate version skew per-se and requires services behind the frontend server to be robust to being called from older clients. The mechanism introduces a trade-off between client convenience and backend-service backward compatibility requirements, but mitigates risks with same-origin request limitations and planned features to support blocking deployments after security fixes or important changes.

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