Vercel recently announced a suite of serverless storage offerings for their cloud platform with Vercel KV, Postgres, and Blob, powered by the company’s infrastructure partners, Neon and Upstash. In addition, the company also launched Vercel Secure Compute, Visual Editing, and Spaces.
The new storage offerings are intended to provide frontend developers building applications for the edge with fast and efficient access to data. In particular, these offerings are:
- Vercel KV (Key-Value) is a serverless Redis solution powered by Upstash, allowing developers to create Redis-compatible databases that can be written to and read from Vercel's Edge Network in regions they specify.
- Vercel Postgres is a serverless SQL database built for the front end powered by Neon, providing developers with a fully managed, highly scalable, fault-tolerant database that delivers high performance and low latency for web applications.
- Vercel Blob is a solution to upload and serve files at the edge currently in preview. The offering provides an API built entirely on top of web standards without the need to configure buckets or implement SDKs.
Source: https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-storage
In a company blog post, the authors explain the rationale behind these storage offerings:
As the world moves away from monolithic architectures to composable ones, there's no shortage of options for backends and databases. But for new projects, the choice can still be paralyzing. In the spirit of being the end-to-end solution for building on the web, we are introducing solutions that are open, easy to use, and scale as efficiently as our frontends.
Furthermore, the company has additional offerings, which include:
- Vercel Secure Compute allows developers to create private connections between serverless functions and protect their backend cloud in order to increase security, compliance, and privacy obligations on the Web. Accompanying this offering is Vercel Firewall.
- Vercel Visual Editing resulted from a partnership with Sanity to introduce a new open standard for content source mapping for headless CMSs, which allows live visual editing of content directly on a website and provides a tunnel directly to the content’s source.
- Vercel Spaces provides powerful tools and conventions designed to integrate with a developer’s monorepo setup to help scale efficiently while retaining quality.
Malte Ubl, CTO at Vercel, told InfoQ:
Developers need tools to build and deploy applications at scale. Our new offerings, which include Storage databases, Vercel Secure Compute, Live Editing, and Vercel Spaces, provide the frontend ecosystem with durable and seamless solutions allowing them to innovate faster. Our expanded suite of cloud-native tools ladders up to our vision for the Frontend Cloud, empowering developers to build, test and deploy high-quality web applications efficiently.
Various people responded to announcements from Vercel; Yehuda Fruchter, an internet entrepreneur and investor, tweeted:
Vercel is becoming a monolith.
With Guillermo Rauch, CEO at Vercel, responding:
Everything about the platform remains composable. In fact, today's announcements are about precisely that: meeting you where you are backend-wise, securely.
Followed by Fruchter’s response:
Yeah, sure I get that, but practically-speaking this will ultimately be Vercel controlling everything end-to-end. I don't think that's a problem, frankly, as the industry needs one-player to "consolidate" all these microservices b/c there r too many options.
Lastly, the pricing details of the offering are available on the respective pricing pages: Vercel KV pricing page, Vercel Postgres pricing page, Vercel blob pricing page, Vercel Secure Compute, Vercel Visual Editing, and Spaces via Enterprise plans.
