[HN Gopher] Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
___________________________________________________________________
Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
Author : mxschmitt
Score : 298 points
Date : 2020-04-21 09:52 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vercel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (vercel.com)
| artur_makly wrote:
| Congrats Guille .. Vamos!!
| jeremiahlee wrote:
| I've been a customer for 3 years. `now` has felt like such a
| great evolution of the Heroku experience, which seemed to stop
| evolving after it got acquired by Salesforce.
|
| Zeit focused on all types of applications when it started, not
| just static frontend and FaaS. I wish it would return to
| supporting apps beyond JAMstack.
| simonw wrote:
| Python works great on Now once you figure out how to deploy it
| there.
|
| The lack of detailed documentation around Python does make me
| nervous that they may drop support for it some day though.
|
| My notes on running a Python app on Now v2:
| https://github.com/simonw/til/blob/master/zeit-now/python-as...
| JimTheDev wrote:
| Yeah they had Go support and yanked it. I don't use go but
| was surprised. Seems like at times they are hoping to be all
| things to everyone and at times trying to be really focused
| (although we might disagree with where they are focusing).
| odensc wrote:
| Wait, they don't support Go? It advertises that on their
| pricing page... https://vercel.com/pricing
|
| And it's listed in their support docs here...
| https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#official-runtimes
| mrkurt wrote:
| Do one for fly.io! :D
| simonw wrote:
| Already done! https://github.com/simonw/datasette-publish-
| fly
|
| They wrote about it on their blog:
| https://fly.io/blog/making-datasets-fly-with-datasette-
| and-f...
| hantusk wrote:
| ^ The re-brand makes much more sense in this light - a young
| company that can still only focus on 1 product, needs a name
| that is associated with their current product, and not now v1
| and v2.
|
| But that was not the reason given - strange to cause such
| confusion.
| Touche wrote:
| What does a rebrand signal? That investors are unhappy and that
| the founders need to align the brand with the vision...
|
| Or is there a more positive reason to rebrand? I would think you
| don't rebrand if things are going super well, right?
| pier25 wrote:
| Other than the practical reasons (Zeit is a common German word)
| their product and focus has changed quite a bit.
|
| They started as serverless docker and changed to CDN + edge
| cloud functions to specialized hosting for front end projects.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| Nextjs is most likely going to be the new Ruby on Rails.
| javascript all the way down, static rendering, PWA, server side
| rendering...everything baked in.
|
| This is a big backing for Next.
|
| However rebranding to Vercel is bad.
| covidcovidcovid wrote:
| I prefer to use other languages on backend something like C#,
| because JavaScript is too error-prone. You can't even just add
| two numbers (try (0.1 + 0.2) === 0.3) without some workarounds.
| and there are millions other issues with the language.
| acdibble wrote:
| It's not just JavaScript with that issue...
| https://0.30000000000000004.com/
| covidcovidcovid wrote:
| Not if you use decimal type that is not available in
| JavaScript.
| SloopJon wrote:
| I'm curious what you're comparing JavaScript to. Decimal
| is the native numeric datatype for the stored procedure
| language of the database I use. Otherwise, even in
| languages that have a decimal class in their standard
| library, it's usually pretty clunky to use; no better
| than, say, https://github.com/MikeMcl/decimal.js/ C# is
| perhaps the best among mainstream languages, although its
| implementation is a bit weird.
| covidcovidcovid wrote:
| What is clunky about decimal type? You declare a decimal
| variable and then use it exactly like any other numeric
| type. Here is an example: https://dotnetfiddle.net/jjJHA6
| WJW wrote:
| 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 returns false in all the interpreters I have
| installed locally (Ruby, Python, NodeJS and Haskell), and you
| can't with a straight face pretend that Haskells type system
| is not strict enough.
|
| Because I was curious, I tested it out with C# on repl.it and
| behold, 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 returns false in C# as well:
| https://repl.it/repls/AdoredValidVirtualmachines. Not very
| surprising of course, since that "error" is a result of the
| IEEE floating point spec and not of any language.
| covidcovidcovid wrote:
| If you write in C# decimal a = 0.1m; decimal b = 0.2m; var
| result = a + b; then you will get exactly 0.3, because
| decimal is a special high-precision numeric type that
| doesn't have such issues.
| Davertron wrote:
| Thank you, I'm so sick of this being used as an example of
| why JavaScript is bad...
| jerrycruncher wrote:
| Agreed. I've shipped projects in ASP.Net MVC, Rails, Django,
| Grails, and Express, and to paraphrase Alan Kay[1], NextJS is
| the first javascript server-side framework worth criticizing.
|
| [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-
| ab...
| franky47 wrote:
| That's the objective of Blitz.js [1]: build on top of Next.js
| for a rails-like experience, but made by an independent open-
| source community.
|
| [1] https://blitzjs.com/ - https://github.com/blitz-js/blitz
| sandGorgon wrote:
| This is very cool.
|
| One suggestion - I highly recommend you mention that you're
| leveraging nextjs. There is a certain buy-in that nextjs has
| that would be hard elsewhere.
|
| In fact I would say that I would totally pay an annual
| subscription for this (even on "starter marketplaces" like
| themeforest).
| flybayer wrote:
| This is literally the first listed feature :)
| franky47 wrote:
| It's not my project, you can probably talk about it with
| its creator: https://twitter.com/flybayer
| k__ wrote:
| Pretty slick!
|
| I thought about making "higher level" frameworks by combining
| "lower level" frameworks myself.
|
| How did you do it? I mean, it's not just wrapping the
| libraries, but also the CLIs.
| [deleted]
| zaiste wrote:
| That's also the objective of Kretes [1], a programming
| environment for TypeScript & Node.js (soon Deno) with built-in
| support for plain SQL and GraphQL
|
| [1]: https://kretes.dev/
| simplify wrote:
| Ruby on Rails is still the new Ruby on Rails. JS solutions
| still need another five years to catch up, unfortunately.
| tsar_nikolai wrote:
| I absolutely love the company and am a happy customer, but for
| the love of time, why give up such a good pun for a name?
|
| (For people not familiar with the german language, zeit means
| time. And 'time now' is simply an amazing name for a product that
| enables you to ship, well, now)
| DangerousPie wrote:
| I always found the name incredible confusing since there is a
| major German newspaper called ZEIT: https://www.zeit.de/
|
| I wonder whether the rebrand is because of that. If they want to
| operate in Germany the new name is definitely better.
| [deleted]
| kalev wrote:
| Might the name change come from one of lead investors named
| 'Accel', who wanted to align the name of zeit more with their own
| brand? Vercel/Accel? I honestly don't understand why you would do
| that though, as you just threw one of the most well known brand
| names in JS ecosystem out of the window.
| daniel_levine wrote:
| Doesn't come from us
| jlelse wrote:
| The name "Zeit" was very confusing for Germans. "Zeit" is the
| regular word for time and there's also a newspaper called "Die
| ZEIT".
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| I'm German and I know of no Germans who where confused by their
| branding.
| adim86 wrote:
| LOL, really? source? Is Germany a big market for them? Apple is
| also a regular word... its's the name of a fruit in English
| brazzy wrote:
| > Is Germany a big market for them?
|
| It's a big market for most internationally operating
| companies, seems a smart move to take that into account
| early.
|
| > Apple is also a regular word... its's the name of a fruit
| in English
|
| And it caused them pretty big problems:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
|
| I'm sure they've thoroughly vetted "Vercel" against potential
| trademark conflicts.
| zoul wrote:
| "We decided to retain our signature triangle logo, although we
| have simplified it."
|
| Is this satire? Can't tell.
| kylemh wrote:
| It's not. It was previously considered signature because it was
| a prism with a gleam on one corner. Post-simplification, I
| would still consider it signature, but definitely not unique.
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| They removed the gradient present on the full logo (which you
| sometimes see).
| choward wrote:
| Same with this:
|
| > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate,
| and excel.
|
| It also "strongly connects" to the words "vermin" and
| "decelerate".
| DagAgren wrote:
| Also, "verizon" and "incel".
| baxuz wrote:
| sounds like "varicocele"
| yboris wrote:
| Also "vermicelli" (even closer in sound to "vermishel'" in
| Russian) :P
| pier25 wrote:
| To me it sounds like some corporate pharma company...
| ltrcola wrote:
| It sounds like a new car name. 2020 Toyota Vercel. Wasn't
| there a model called the Tercel?
| bdcravens wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Tercel
| Rauchg wrote:
| Vercel CEO here. We are incredibly delighted to bring the new
| brand to the world and share the news of our funding.
|
| For everyone who's been on this journey with us so far, thank
| you, and we look forward to a lot more!
| marvindanig wrote:
| How will the investors recoup their investment? What are Vercel
| users going to give up to please your new overlords?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Vercel charges money for a service:
| https://vercel.com/pricing
| karanganesan wrote:
| curious why was the name Zeit not preferred?
| wdb wrote:
| To make people wonder how you are supposed to pronounce
| Vercel I guess.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Heidegger wrote Sein und Zeit and was a literal Nazi.
| devmunchies wrote:
| Who cares. He was a philosopher and a interesting one.
| That's like not reading Ezra Pound's poetry even though
| it's some of the best of all time. American post-war
| propaganda did a number on you if you're that whipped.
| Nietzsche (another German, oh no!) calls that the slave
| morality.
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| Nazis used the German language, surprising.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't do this here.
| brazzy wrote:
| It's a German word and the name of one of Germany's biggest
| newspapers, and probably part of the name of dozens of
| businesses in all kinds of industries in Germany.
|
| Using a made-up brand name is the standard way to avoid
| potential trademark conflicts, and at the same time be more
| easily findable via Google.
| netsharc wrote:
| Yeah, not having your name instantly googleable in Germany
| (a big economy with a lot of developers) is probably a
| hindrance. Not to mention how stupid it would be to use in
| a sentence, imagine calling your product "Time", and a
| developer says e.g. "we're having issues with time.."
| jonas21 wrote:
| A lot of products sound stupid when used in a sentence
| before you get used to them.
|
| We're having issues with zoom...
|
| We're having issues with chrome...
|
| We're having issues with word...
| PKop wrote:
| The less nonsensical the word in context, the more
| confusing it is though. Do you dispute that "we're having
| issues with time" is much more vague and overloaded, than
| "we're having issues with zoom"?
| cam-perry wrote:
| A camera developer might find "having issues with zoom"
| as confusing as a dev dealing with timezones finds
| "having issues with time". Everyone has a different
| context that may make your name confusing to them.
| deltron3030 wrote:
| Gotta flip that triangle icon tho..
| CSSer wrote:
| I'm surprised to see so many people nagging about the brand. As
| one user pointed out, there's a big newspaper brand with that
| name already. And otherwise, who cares, really? Same company.
| It's not a soccer team.
| PKop wrote:
| I think the discussion would be different if the new name was
| better.
|
| Replacing zeit makes sense, not sure the chosen replacement was
| any good.
| CSSer wrote:
| Fair enough. I guess I know what Zeit means, but not Vercel.
| Maybe they just wanted the "V" to fit nicely next to the
| triangle? ;)
| bsimpson wrote:
| Looks like React's originators (Jordan Walk and Pete Hunt) are
| funders.
| ushakov wrote:
| glad you renamed it. The Zeit i know, was able to serve Docker
| images
| adriand wrote:
| As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is
| amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This
| is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am
| willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into
| this new name also hated the new name when they heard it.
|
| Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be
| rebranded, we always asked them not to provide any feedback on
| the name until they had given it a day or two to sink in. Almost
| invariably the feedback was, "I hated it when I first heard it,
| but it has really grown on me."
|
| Examples of names that would be very easy to criticize on first
| hearing that have become incredibly successful brands abound.
| Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name. Now it's a verb. I
| won't waste your time with more examples.
| kugelblitz wrote:
| Yeah, a rebranding will always sound weird at first. The
| question is whether the upside is better in the long-term -
| time will tell. Vercel does sound good (though does sound close
| to parcel for me and also reads like vermicelli a bit).
|
| For "Zeit" I am biased, since I speak German and it translates
| to "time" (and there's a large circulation newspaper called
| "Zeit"... well, actually "Die Zeit" which reads funny in
| English - but actually fits for this rebranding :-) ).
|
| When "Open BC" (Germany's LinkedIn, BC stands for Business
| Club) renamed itself to "Xing" 14 years ago, it felt really
| weird to me. Though I think by now most people on the Xing
| platform won't even remember the old name. And in 5 years time,
| people who weren't even born when it was rebranded will start
| joining the platform.
| PKop wrote:
| >For "Zeit" I am biased
|
| Biased which way, did you think it was good or bad?
| p1lonn wrote:
| Hmmm, perhaps they had a trademark issue in Germany? That
| explains a rebrand cleanly. Of course they did.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| What value is there in renaming anything? You've said that out
| that "Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name." but you
| imply it doesn't matter - so what's the point?
|
| Isn't rebranding what companies do when they run out of ideas
| (one of my old employers changed its name at least 3 times
| because... why? I doubt they have a viable product yet. A name
| change isn't going to help).
| grawprog wrote:
| >Isn't rebranding what companies do when they run out of
| ideas (one of my old employers changed its name at least 3
| times because... why?
|
| This is what I figure. That or they want people to forget
| about lousy things they've done. Dunno if it was ever true,
| but hearing the rumour that Kentucky fried chicken switched
| to KFC to avoid being associated with fried chicken and the
| health issues surrounding trans fats that were a big deal at
| the time sort of stuck with me.
|
| Personally, I'd trust the company that's kept the same boring
| name for a decade over one that's renamed themselves several
| times in the same period.
| adriand wrote:
| > What value is there in renaming anything? You've said that
| out that "Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name." but
| you imply it doesn't matter - so what's the point?
|
| To be clear, my sentence was slightly syntactically
| incorrect: what I meant was, "Google is a stupid- and
| juvenile-sounding name." It's not a stupid name, but it is
| stupid-sounding, at least until you get used to it. But it's
| far from a stupid name. For instance: it's spelled the way it
| sounds, it's memorable, and it sounds like a verb. Those are
| all pluses, and yes, they matter.
|
| I once worked for a company called Internet Enterprises.
| Terrible name. It sounds like a shell company with dusty
| offices on a service road off a highway.
|
| I once owned a design agency called factor[e] design
| initiative (I didn't found it or name it). Poor brand story:
| the "e" was chosen because at the time (late 90s) "e" was
| like "i" from a few years ago. No other good reason. It was
| spelled all lower-case, like e. e. cummings (annoying for a
| company). It had weird punctuation marks in it. And how do
| you pronounce it? I would commonly hear "factory" or
| "factor-E" (correct). I used to joke it was "fac-TOR-ay" (say
| that with an Italian accent).
|
| A few years in, we rebranded to Parallel. Much better:
| regular spelling and capitalization, dictionary word and a
| good brand story (alignment / working "in parallel" with
| clients, etc.) At times, in conversations with clients, they
| would inadvertently use the brand: "We'd like to work in
| parallel with you..."
|
| This stuff matters--a lot! It's easier to attract customers
| and employees with a great brand. And the brand provides a
| consistent touch point - a "north star" if you will - for
| what the company stands for.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| To run from a bad reputation
|
| To expand in to a market that already has a well known
| company by that name
|
| Hard to rank for it for search purposes
|
| Brand is about a specific niche that you want to expand out
| of
| ghaff wrote:
| There are various types of rebranding that may or may not
| involve renaming. However, with respect to renaming
| specifically, it often also comes about because your
| company name now bears no relationship to what you actually
| do.
|
| To take a random example from a past life, NL Industries
| used to be the Nation Lead Company but, while they still
| have some involvement in pigments, they don't actually do
| anything related to lead any more AFAIK. (This is a major
| reason companies switch from a descriptive name to just
| some letters.)
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| After the renaming you mentioned of NL, was there any
| lasting measurable business effect such as change in
| turnover, profit, new customers, anything at all?
| ghaff wrote:
| I have no idea. They did it decades ago.
|
| I will say that it's easy to say that none of this stuff
| matters at all. And it's very hard to quantify among a
| zillion other variables. Is it crucial in the grand
| scheme of things? Probably not. But things like brand
| awareness and brand perception can matter--at least at
| the margins.
| jkrems wrote:
| Pure speculation but: "Zeit" is a super common German word.
| So if you want to protect your brand internationally but
| there's a major newspaper in one of the biggest economies
| that is _also_ called exactly "Zeit" - that's kind of bad.
| Vercel is much more unique. You can't get
| https://twitter.com/zeit because it's the newspaper. You
| can't get zeit.de because it's the newspaper. You could get
| zeit.com but you'd compete with the newspaper for it. Picking
| a brand that doesn't have as much baggage could be convenient
| down the line.
| laputan_machine wrote:
| Is Google a rebrand?
| singlow wrote:
| The software was named Backrub, before they started the
| company. I wouldn't call it a rebrand, since they never used
| that as a company name. Almost every product has a pre-
| release name that was never used as a brand.
| hoofhearted wrote:
| BackRub
| pier25 wrote:
| Yes but that doesn't mean Vercel is a good name either.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Related: ConvertKit rebranded to seva and then fairly promptly
| rolled the decision back based on customer feedback.
| https://convertkit.com/staying-convertkit gives details. I was
| pleased at the reversion, though for completely different
| reasons: I think the rebrand was foolish purely because it went
| from a memorable name with meaning (even if that meaning didn't
| exactly match the purpose for all of their customers) to a
| four-letter word that's meaningless to most people and says
| nothing at all about the company or product.
| swyx wrote:
| wow, i wasnt even aware of that rebrand. seva sounds so
| awful, whereas im already super invested in the ConvertKit
| story. good reversal of decision there.
| BossingAround wrote:
| As a person who has never heard neither ConvertKit nor
| Seva, both sound absolutely equal to me. 0 preference as a
| passer-by.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| For what little it's worth, I'd never heard either name before
| and I think they are both terrible.
| kreetx wrote:
| But what if this one specifically _is_ a bad rebranding?
| [deleted]
| hoofhearted wrote:
| My personal opinion is that every great company can have one
| re-brand in their lifetime, and many have. To name a few:
| BackRub, Cadabra, Doorbot, Justin.tv
| fredguth wrote:
| Honest questions, which rebranding you know worked? I mean,
| really.... I get the idea and even agree with it. It is just
| very hard to do it well.
| james-mcelwain wrote:
| "Jamstack" has to be the worst name for an architecture ever.
| "Javascript", "APIs", and "markup"... uhhh you mean like what the
| entire web already runs on?
| hashkb wrote:
| It stands for "Just Attempt Moving" off of our hosted service.
| ankitkumar98 wrote:
| Great to see this company growing :)
| neom wrote:
| Congrats Guillermo!! Vercel is awesome, can't wait to see where
| you take the business. Keep up the great work.
| gitgud wrote:
| A shame they changed the name, I liked "Zeit". The re-branding
| reminds me of the browser IDE "Hyperdev" which changed to "Gomix"
| and finally to "Glitch"... Everytime the name changes, people
| care less... but I'm no businessman
|
| > [1] _...Therefore, all new plans include unlimited Bandwidth,
| Builds, and Serverless Function Execution_
|
| Also, the new pricing is a bit more approachable, when I last
| looked it seemed a bit expensive for Serverless functions.
|
| [1] https://vercel.com/blog/simpler-pricing
| foreign-inc wrote:
| Have anyone used both https://redwoodjs.com and Nextjs and share
| their experience?
| matallo wrote:
| Interested in this, too.
| deltron3030 wrote:
| Redwood doesn't hide their tutorial behind an account like
| Nextjs does, they're more user friendly. And it was impressive
| how smooth it went considering the underlying complexity of the
| tech stack.
| swyx wrote:
| ive tried out both. next.js focuses very much on the SSR/SSG
| job, whereas Redwood both stretches further in front of the
| stack (with Cells and a Form library) and further back in the
| stack (with Prisma/GraphQL). next is a lot more mature (5yrs?)
| whereas redwood is new. that help?
| m00dy wrote:
| ZEIT always sounded me something from Templars.
| [deleted]
| mxschmitt wrote:
| Just great to see how this company grows and produces awesome
| developer tools, frameworks and platforms to improve the
| developer and user experience.
| sholladay wrote:
| I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being
| more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their
| promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site
| had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1]
| [2]
|
| Fool me once...
|
| 1:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...
|
| 2:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...
| RonanTheGrey wrote:
| I was an early adopter of Now v1 and loved it. I evangelized it
| to all my clients, used it on every project - it was such a
| breath of fresh air that _deploying a server_ was now so easy.
|
| Ok, I get that serverless is a different paradigm. And I
| understand the arguments for it. But I refused to use Now v2
| precisely _because_ they violated their promises they had made
| -- but worse, turned it into "just another AWS". If I want
| serverless, I'll use AWS because frankly Zeit/Vercel's
| visibility into what is going on is just abysmal. And FWIW we
| now have several projects running on serverless -- using
| Next.js -- on AWS. Using the severless component, it requires
| NO special considerations and could easily be redeployed on a
| standard server in minutes. No vendor lock in, funny how that
| worked out? I expected to be locked in on AWS serverless. That
| didn't happen.
|
| The icing on the cake was when they didn't officially deprecate
| v1, but made it so unstable, so unusable, that I got to the
| point of spending DAYS per week deploying and redeploying and
| redeploying our docker containers because their servers would
| randomly decide that the hosting server no longer had a network
| connection. If I see E_AGAIN one more time I'm going to spit.
|
| And then they upped the price from $20/mo that we were paying
| for 4 containers, to $150. Thanks guys.
|
| It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I spent a day, redid
| everything to deploy on AWS EB, and haven't looked back since.
| That was the LEAST amount of time I'd spent on that, in a given
| week, for about a 4 month period prior. To be fair, the guy
| running Zeit/Vercel's support is pretty solid. He did try to be
| helpful.
|
| My experience with the technical leadership has been left
| lacking. We tried several times to contribute to Next.js and
| were treated like idiot children because how dare we trample on
| their kingdom. If you're not a tech bro, stay in your lane!
|
| Look I'm just sharing my experience over there. It has been
| roundly negative. I'm sure others can come with anecdotes of it
| being roundly positive, good for you. Mine is just another
| anecdote but it's the only insight I have.
|
| Although, the 1500+ comment thread on Spectrum when they
| announced v2 strongly suggests I'm not alone.
| arist0tl3 wrote:
| Hey, I'm curious about your migration. Can you contact me via
| my profile?
| DagAgren wrote:
| Same here. Migration path to Heroku was easier than migration
| path to Zeit v2, and Heroku hasn't fucked me over by forcing me
| to migrate to an entirely new model yet.
| sholladay wrote:
| I also went to Heroku. Icing on the cake was when I
| discovered that even on Heroku's free plan, we were getting
| significantly better performance than on Zeit's paid plan.
| Response times were more stable and had far less latency.
| Made me really happy and almost made it worth the frustration
| of having to migrate in the first place. Almost. Heroku has
| definitely improved over the years.
| baxuz wrote:
| I honestly don't understand this fetishization of "serverless"
| functions. It leads to so much vendor lock-in, tooling
| complexity, and straight-up lack of features.
| zoul wrote:
| For me as a noob with very simple requirements, it's _very_
| refreshing not having to care where and how my server code
| runs. Just add to a repo, push and forget. And if my code is
| written against some simple HTTP request interface, there
| shouldn't be much trouble to move it elsewhere.
| baxuz wrote:
| I've recently had a simple requirement. To build a site
| with content gated behind a paywall.
|
| There's no way to have SSR'd gated content without paying a
| gazillion bucks to either netlify or next for role-based
| redirects.
|
| Even if I would go for CSR'd content for the gated part,
| I'd have to fiddle with JWT tokens.
|
| To handle users, I'd have to use a 3rd party service such
| as oauth, since zeit doesn't support users, and netlify's
| model is severely limited.
|
| For a CMS, I'd have to again go for a subscription model.
|
| Data and APIs are also another issue. There is no way to
| use something like Strapi since that needs to have a real
| DB behind it.
|
| Now, to orchestrate the users for role-base redirects,
| oauth, payment gateaway data and everything else... I've no
| idea where to even start.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Don't. Just use a real backend. btw, Hasura can work with
| Google cloud run and heroku. Check it out. It's similar
| to strapi.
| nunopato wrote:
| Nhost (https://nhost.io/) is another option for Hasura.
| rpeden wrote:
| Wouldn't WordPress with a couple of plugins solve the
| content with a paywall problem in about 15 minutes?
|
| I'm not asking that flippantly. And I know there are
| plenty of reasons not to use WP, so I apologize if this
| is a dumb question.
|
| It just seems like WP might solve that particular problem
| for you without much work. And it solves other problems
| too, like managing users and tracking revision history
| for every piece of content.
|
| I think Digital Ocean has a one click setup for
| WordPress. WP isn't my favorite software to work with as
| a developer, but I use it when it's the right took for
| the job because for the most part, I've been able to
| deploy it and forget about it because it has just kept
| chugging along and getting the job done without any
| intervention from me.
| mercer wrote:
| I use Wordpress for many clients because it's the
| simplest solution that also ensure they can find other
| developers to take over if I'm not there.
|
| Wordpress is a dumpster fire and I hate it with a
| passion, though. Like, viscerally, almost as much as I
| dislike Drupal and Joomla. I'd use the term PTSD but that
| strikes me as insensitive.
|
| But I still use it for many clients, because it's the
| simplest, easiest solution that other (and crucially,
| cheap!) developers can take over when I'm not there
| anymore.
| pbreit wrote:
| So, where do you host? What data store do you use?
| dominotw wrote:
| I host data on firebase db use firebase cloud functions
| for "serverless" compute. I just do android development
| and never mess with AWS/k8s/whatever.
| zoul wrote:
| Last thing we needed was a simple unsubscribe service for
| a database hosted on AirTable, a few lines of code. It
| totally makes sense to me to host such glue on Now.
| justrudd wrote:
| I built an ETL on top of AWS Lambda.
|
| I had to pull data from Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, Twitter,
| and Pinterest on a schedule - once an hour. The pipeline took
| about 3 minutes to run. I used a CloudEvent cron to kick it
| off, a few lambdas, stored the raw data in S3, had another
| lambda massage that data, stored the final data into S3, and
| put a message into SQS letting my OLTP system know that it
| could bring it in.
|
| Worked great. Were there other ways to build it? Sure. Could
| have done it on the same hosts that my OLTP system was
| running on. But the amount of memory it used for that 3
| minutes doubled the amount that was needed on the host
| normally. Yes I could have optimized it. But my time was
| better spent figuring out other issues (I was sole developer
| on the project). So I just broke it into a bunch of different
| parts and kicked up to Lambda. Worked great. Never had any
| issues with it. Never worried about not having resources. I
| think it cost .2 to .8 USD each run? So ~600 USD a month at
| the high end. And it took me less than a day to break it up
| and get it running vs who knows how long to optimize.
|
| So it definitely solved a problem I had in a very efficient
| way, and allowed me to speed it up just by spending money.
| dzonga wrote:
| people are in love with engineering but not shipping paid
| products. a rails | django | laravel developer is busy
| shipping. while someone is busy developing 1000s
| microservices. n that's before the complexity of react, redux
| n graphql
| wpietri wrote:
| I think there are legitimate use cases. E.g., I needed to
| help somebody with a little glue between Twilio and a SaaS
| tool. It was really nice to take a couple of functions, turn
| them into endpoints, and know that Amazon was going to worry
| about keeping them always available.
|
| I agree it's so far wildly overblown, but I get that too. A
| lot of people are scared by ops, and "serverless" promises
| they don't have to think about it. For those of us
| comfortable with ops, even the name is an obvious lie. But
| for people who just have some code they want to run, getting
| it usefully deployed is still too hard.
|
| Right now I feel like we're in a transitional era. The old
| model of individual single-purpose or multi-purpose servers
| is obviously inadequate. "Virtual server" is like "horseless
| carriage"; we know that the old paradigm is wrong, but we
| haven't found the new one. There are lots of contenders, but
| it seems like none of them have nailed it. The similar era
| for automobiles was circa 1900, where steam, electric, and
| internal combustion were all duking it out, with dozens of
| small manufacturers. I'll be very interested to see what we
| consolidate around.
| [deleted]
| minieggs wrote:
| To offer another perspective... I've migrated services
| to/from Now v2 (never used v1). While recently moving a Go
| service off (to a regular server) all that was changed was
| some bash that executed in a pre-deploy hook and the `now`
| command was swapped for a `scp`. `sed 's/package main/package
| handler/g'`. Of course, this is much simpler if the services
| are created with migration in mind.
|
| I like to think of the builder options put in the `now.json`
| file as I would a webpack config.
| dfee wrote:
| You trade known deployment problems for unknown infra
| management problems. You reduce the complexity of
| contribution significantly.
|
| If you're at a company that wants to manage K8s, and you've
| chosen to invest in that direction, then serverless doesn't
| make a lot of sense.
|
| If your customers aren't buying compute, then you should be
| wary of large investments that are outside your core focus.
|
| Sure, there are quite a few problems with lambdas. But the
| abstraction you're working at is much more atomic. And you
| don't need FTEs to manage K8s and introduce a completely new
| set of problems.
|
| Less is more (is the argument).
| manigandham wrote:
| You don't need serverless/FaaS for that. PaaS has existed
| for a long time, and many providers will now let you run
| any container image which is a lot more portable than
| custom frameworks. Zeit v1 actually did this.
| danharaj wrote:
| Serverless is just zoomer Common Gateway Interface for
| venture capitalists
| snow_js wrote:
| Now v1 was such an awesome abstraction, I was inspired to
| recreate the CLI on top of Kubernetes, to avoid any vendor
| lock-in. I also needed v1 capabilities like websocket support
| that went away with the v2 lambdas. This CLI utility has
| support for a few major cloud Kubernetes providers.
|
| https://github.com/snowjs/cli
| RonanTheGrey wrote:
| Concur, if you're looking for a replacement for the old Now
| v1, snowjs is a great option. Haven't used it extensively
| since we moved away from Now, but when I was investigating
| alternatives I came across this and gave it a go and was very
| pleased.
|
| Ultimately we went another way but it is a solid project.
| lewi wrote:
| Oh damn. This is awesome, will have to give it a go.
| palmdeezy wrote:
| This looks great!
| m00dy wrote:
| I use ZEIT for my side projects now. It is extremely efficient
| and time saver.
| evanweaver wrote:
| Congrats Guillermo and team!
| matthewcford wrote:
| one of our clients uses netlify, does anyone have experience with
| the two platforms and how they compare on price at the enterprise
| levels?
| iamtherhino wrote:
| Vercel/ZEIT is typically a bit cheaper in the long run for
| popular sites with the fixed costs. If your traffic is really
| light, then Netlify probably is.
|
| If deploying a Next.js site, it makes sense to deploy on top of
| the platform made for it (ZEIT/Vercel)
| franky47 wrote:
| Congrats on the funding, but I'd like to know what prompted the
| name change. ZEIT sounded mysterious and edgy, while Vercel
| sounds like a company selling expensive handbags (to me).
| tango12 wrote:
| EDIT: Not sure why, but from the article:
|
| > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate,
| and excel.
| DagAgren wrote:
| I connected it to none of those words. Instead, I connected
| it to a) some kind of telephone company that is dodgy b)
| incels.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Vercel sounds like something about vermin and incels.
| RonanTheGrey wrote:
| Lmao... this is what I heard when I read the word the
| first time too. "Incel..?"
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Self-delusional marketingspeak. To me 'Vercel' sounds like a
| brand of cheap batteries.
| neutronicus wrote:
| And to me it sounds like a plasma-physics simulation
| package running on supercomputers.
|
| \ _shrug\_
| BossingAround wrote:
| Batteries is what came to my mind. Like Duracell.
| ljm wrote:
| Sounds boring and enterprisey to me.
| PKop wrote:
| That's not the "reason" though, that's the rationalization
| choward wrote:
| That's just marketing speak. It doesn't actually explain why
| they changed their name.
| CPLX wrote:
| I mean it's a complete and total wild ass guess but the
| obvious reason to change one's name is if you've identified
| another entity that is using that name in a way which could
| prevent you from global exclusive use of the brand.
|
| It's the kind of thing that could easily have come up in
| due diligence for the large recent investment.
| kernelsanderz wrote:
| Doing a quick search of TESS2 for trademarks look they
| already have the trademark registered for ZEIT
| (registered in 2017). So it was probably for other
| reasons. Which is a shame, because Zeit is very concise,
| easy to remember, and has a strong brand today - at least
| with their initial audience.
|
| Sounds like they're trying to go for a more corporate
| customer with their new name.
| CPLX wrote:
| It's a big world out there.
| adim86 wrote:
| Yeah but that's why they chose Vercel not why the name ZEIT
| had to be changed in the first place
| mxstbr wrote:
| The name change makes a lot of sense to me, tactically (no
| matter what you think of the new name).
|
| ZEIT is associated with full-stack hosting including backend
| servers, which they no longer want to focus on to. To solidify
| their pivot to frontend hosting in their users mind, they
| rename to strip all previous connotations from their brand.
| deltron3030 wrote:
| Names are like colors and shapes, and their new one doesn't
| really indicate that they're innovators. Zeit was cool
| because german names in tech are quite rare, it was showing
| that they did things differently. Vercel sounds like a lame
| web 1.0 thing, it's more rigid, rolls way harder off the
| tongue.
|
| Focusing on backend servers or not is just a implementation
| detail as a hosting company that want's you to not care about
| the underlying tech, the name itself is way more important at
| their size.
| [deleted]
| xky wrote:
| To me, it sounds like a medication.
| subpixel wrote:
| Zeit means "time" in German, is the name of a German newspaper,
| and surely made organic SEO a challenge...much like Now did.
| ezzzzz wrote:
| Literally just discovered Zeit, what I liked about it was the
| ability to choose different run-times, with a generous free tier,
| with none of the existential baggage of the other PAAS's options
| out there. Sigh, oh well.
| mcsdev wrote:
| Everything you liked about ZEIT is present in Vercel! You can
| read more about it in our rebrand field book:
| https://www.notion.so/Vercel-Launch-1cab2369ab1c4d8db1987b68...
| DagAgren wrote:
| Everything I liked about Zeit was Now v1, so, not really?
| RonanTheGrey wrote:
| It took me awhile to come to terms with the truth that "You
| are not their target customer." Fair enough.
|
| Except that they built their brand off the backs of people
| they no longer want using their platform...
| bengale wrote:
| Awesome. I normally work on just web apps but had to build a
| website recently that had some complex bits in some pages but
| mainly a marketing site. The experience with nextjs and deploying
| with zeit was brilliant. Docs are good, everything works well,
| just an all round good experience. Please don't break it!
| SnowingXIV wrote:
| I might be missing something. How does this compare with netlify
| which I've been using sometime as my 'heroku' for static sites?
| With that I'm also getting the ability to post-process things,
| use lambda functions, even get get forms for free (up to a point)
| which is needed for almost every site. It also provides slick
| DNS. Has worked wonders with gulp/jekyll/etc builds. This does
| seem to do all of that with the exception of forms.
|
| If this is just another choice that's good. Perhaps it's faster?
| I've deployed using zeit and it is a really smooth process but
| not much different than netlify's build that works with a git
| push. Either way, congrats on the funding!
|
| Disclaimer: I don't work for netlify, though I did interview with
| them awhile back.
| rymate1234 wrote:
| Main difference with Vercel / ZEIT is that unlike Netlify, it
| can more easily have SSR pages.
|
| So like if you're using NextJS for instance, on Netlify you can
| only really use the static site generation features of NextJS,
| whereas with Vercel you have SSR pages as well as the API
| functions.
|
| Also Vercel _can_ do full standard servers if needed, including
| for NodeJS https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-
| usage/advanced-nod... or Python
| https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-pyt...
| pier25 wrote:
| But Netlify also has cloud functions, no?
| [deleted]
| sna1l wrote:
| I had a ton of trouble getting a simple gatsby.js website running
| on Zeit. Kept getting useless error messages that were impossible
| to debug.
|
| Tried Netlify and it worked without any changes to my code. The
| Zeit UI might be slicker, but it definitely isn't easier to use
| imo.
| marban wrote:
| From unbrandable to unpronounceable.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| - "ZEIT is now Vercel. This new identity aligns with our new
| focus -- to provide the ultimate workflow for developing,
| previewing, and shipping Jamstack sites."
|
| What did the person writing this smoke? And who reads this and
| doesn't think of the company as being full of shit? Also,
| rebranding this is an utterly stupid move. Why on earth would you
| take the Zeit Brand and rename it into this bullshit concoction
| of words that you now feel to include in your company's mission
| statement? You throw away so much brand power. Zeit is a real
| household name in the JS world, so much that even I know it, and
| I wouldn't touch JavaScript or JAMSTACK with a barge pole. Vercel
| is just a faceless hull.
|
| Otherwise, congratulations on securing funding, you guys surely
| deliver a lot of value to a lot of developers and that's
| commendable.
| erulabs wrote:
| Congratulations on the funding Guillermo!
| crousto wrote:
| Judging by the comments so far, the name change backlash is of
| unseen-since-Qwikster proportions...
| mtm7 wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of Zeit/Vercel's products and design. I've
| interacted with their team on a few occasions and they've always
| been nice. Plus, their mechanical keyboard is super cool... [0]
|
| I absolutely loved the name "Zeit", although I've read in this
| thread that it could have branding/SEO issues. I'm hoping Vercel
| will grow on me - right now, it sounds like a combination of
| "incel", "Verizon", and maybe some kind of geriatric medicine.
|
| [0]: https://vercel.com/keyboard
| [deleted]
| bionhoward wrote:
| I liked Zeit but had to switch because there was no way to get IP
| addresses to whitelist, so Vercel customers are likely to get
| hacked, because they're forced to secure their database with only
| a password, and no firewall. Apparently you can fix this with an
| "enterprise" subscription, which is a huge red flag. Open source
| doesn't get secure data? Vercel is likely to get hit with huge
| lawsuits over that, and I'm staying well clear until it's fixed
| telotortium wrote:
| What lawsuits? Don't virtually all open-source licenses in
| existence disclaim any warranty or fitness for a particular
| purpose?
| bionhoward wrote:
| True, and I'm not a lawyer, but I don't care about them
| getting sued, I care about the fact I can't protect
| customers' data if I use Vercel
| swyx wrote:
| congrats team! 21m series A is hefty even before coronavirus.
| Good to have locked it in.
|
| I've been following this frontend-gets-fullstack-abilities trend
| for a while. I think Next.js is the best expression of this idea,
| and is truly the crown jewel of Vercel and also the React
| ecosystem.
|
| Unlike other React distros like Gatsby or Create-React-App,
| Next.js is the first "hybrid" framework that lets you choose
| whether to deploy static or serverless pages on a per page level.
| This means you can ship features without being locked into app
| level architectural choices. Even static pages get a "Preview"
| mode, solving a key pain point for content workflow. (all with
| the caveat that you must use a hosting setup capable of
| supporting these features, and naturally Vercel is the best place
| to do that if you don't want to roll your own). A few months ago
| Dan Abramov noted[0]:
|
| > The next wave of techniques won't be about putting everything
| on the client. Or doing everything on the server. It will let you
| move code between them without friction, and adjust the tradeoff
| to the use case. Take advantage of both. The Middle Way.
|
| I see Next.js as the way most of the ecosystem will experience
| this colocation of client and server concerns.
|
| The other trend I see is that React is continuing to work on
| integrated client-and-server experiences. (Note: everything I
| discuss here are experimental projects by the React team, so
| should not be taken as an official roadmap). React Suspense's
| introduction [1] was strongly tied to Relay, which introduces a
| compiler that offers stronger client-server guarantees for
| working with GraphQL [2]. React Flight will offer streaming
| server side rendering [3], while React Blocks will offer a
| generic way to suspend on queries without such strong coupling to
| GraphQL [4].
|
| I expect that Next.js will also be the first place most React
| devs experience these improvements (they may be more under the
| hood by the time it rolls out), and naturally Vercel benefits.
|
| Lastly, it's also fun to speculate on the future of Vercel
| outside of being "hosted Next.js". Guillermo's blogpost [5] has
| the appealing tagline "AWS for frontend developers". How many of
| those great logos that run Next.js is Vercel actually capturing?
| Is Vercel appealing enough to them that they also host non-
| Next.js projects with Vercel? Can we view Vercel as a "No Code
| backend"? Can Vercel deepen its 3rd party integrations to become
| a true marketplace/aggregator of frontend demand for backend/api
| services? What, fundamentally, is Vercel selling other than
| bandwidth, serverless functions, and devops-as-a-service
| software? Maybe that's plenty.
|
| ---
|
| references
|
| 0: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1193001108102373376
|
| 1: https://reactjs.org/blog/2019/11/06/building-great-user-
| expe...
|
| 2: https://dev.to/zth/relay-the-graphql-client-that-wants-to-
| do...
|
| 3:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/dtsi1q/react_fligh...
|
| 4: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1239013168682274816
|
| 5: https://rauchg.com/2020/vercel
| harisvs-code wrote:
| I really liked the zeit brand. Vercel not so much. I hope that
| the name grows on me, either way I dont care as long as the tech
| is great.
| thrwaway69 wrote:
| Odd for them to change branding when zeit is so well known
| everywhere. And given their products have simple and non
| googleable names, people have been tagging now and next with zeit
| so it's googleable.
|
| Good to see free personal plan tho.
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(page generated 2020-04-21 23:00 UTC)