Cloud & Deployment3 min read
AWS vs Vercel: where should you actually deploy a Next.js app?
Vercel sells you time. AWS sells you control. The right answer depends on which of the two your team is short of.
Cloud and deployment guides comparing AWS and Vercel, sizing servers, planning architecture, controlling cost and handling zero-downtime releases.
Vercel sells you time. AWS sells you control. The right answer depends on which of the two your team is short of.
Every host looks fine on day one. The differences show up when traffic triples, a region goes down, or you need to leave.
Putting a CDN in front of a site does nothing by itself. The cache headers you send decide whether it helps or just adds a hop.
Serverless is excellent for spiky, stateless, short work. The trouble starts when your workload is none of those things.
Most cloud bills have 30% of obvious waste in them. Finding it takes an afternoon; the hard part is having the conversation about what to turn off.
DNS is the layer everyone touches twice a year and nobody remembers. It is also the fastest way to take a site offline for 24 hours.
Certificates are free and automatic now. The remaining failures are almost all renewal automation that silently stopped working.
Routing uploads through your application server is the default and the wrong one. Presigned URLs remove the bottleneck and most of the risk.
Most teams asking for multi-region want lower latency for distant users. That is usually a CDN problem, not an architecture problem.
The question is not whether a secret will leak. It is whether you will know, and how long it takes to make the leaked one useless.
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