For this project, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a new cloud platform called Vercel. Vercel is a service that offers infrastructure to deploy scalable, secure, and quick web applications with the NextJS framework.
To provide a brief history of Vercel, it was founded in 2015 by a man named Guillermo Rauch. At this time it was referred to as ZEIT, but in 2020, it was officially rebranded to Vercel. The company, after raising $100 million in 2021, is now valued at $2.5 billion.
Over the past five or so months, my experience with Vercel has been great. We started using it completely for free and are currently paying for access to the project because each of us agree that it’s worth the cost.
Vercel makes the deployment process easy. Not only does it automatically deploy our changes pushed to the main branch of our repository, but it also creates preview branches to test individual pull requests and features. This speeds up the development process and ensures we don’t release code without knowing how it will work in production.
Not only can you deploy your application using Vercel, but you also have the ability to add integrations, monitor bandwidth and statistics, an activity log all for your sites used with the platform.
One of my favorite parts about Vercel is their offer of the Hobby plan. This plan allows developers working on personal or small-scale applications to deploy their application for free. I think is an amazing feature and gives new developers and new companies with limited budget an option to do their deployment for free. It’s one of the reasons we decided to move forward with Vercel to begin with as we just needed a way to deploy our application for our capstone project.
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