What does Vercel do?

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.