Next.js builder Vercel spruces up edge network

Vercel has made performance and ease-of-use enhancements to its cloud platform and CDN for static sites

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27 July 2020

Vercel has enhanced its edge platform for content delivery with better performance, improved ease of use, and automatic global failover. The improvements are designed to optimise the experience for both front-end developers and web users.

The company’s edge platform, called the Vercel Edge Network, has been rearchitected for faster routing, improved caching, and backward compatibility. The Vercel Edge Network leverages the company’s open source Next.js framework for the React JavaScript UI library. Next.js enables static site generation and server-side rendering while enabling React applications that pre-render, code-split, and hot-reload with no configuration.

New enhancements to the Vercel Edge Network, unveiled 21 July, include:

Rearchitected cloud functionality for local cloud hosts, with tools to replicate customisable functions.
Enhanced framework integration, with users able to run Next.js, Gatsby, Vue.js, and other JavaScript frameworks on local hosts. Next.js integration of Facebook’s React Refresh enables real-time page visualisation on local hosts.
Automatic global failover, to leverage the distributed caching of the Vercel CDN to eliminate approaches that require repetitive round trips to origins due to caching misconfigurations. Automation offers improved resiliency and performance.
Incremental static site generation, to enable users to have new pages generated automatically when data changes.

Vercel, previously named Zeit, said it hosts 63,000 projects that are active at least once a week.

IDG News Service