Episode #50: Static First Using Serverless Front-ends with Guillermo Rauch

About Guillermo Rauch:
Guillermo Rauch is the CEO of Vercel, but before starting the company in 2015, he was CTO and co-founder of LearnBoost and Cloudup, acquired by Automattic in 2013. Guillermo is also the creator of several popular Node.js open source libraries like socket.io, mongoose and slackin. Prior to Node.js, he was a core developer of the MooTools frontend toolkit.

• Twitter: twitter.com/rauchg
• Vercel: vercel.com
• Next.js: nextjs.org

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/iRNxV9vRg6o

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm speaking with Guillermo Rauch. Hey Guillermo, thanks for joining me.

Guillermo: Hey, thanks for having me.

Jeremy: You are the CEO of Vercel, which was formerly ZEIT, so I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your background, and what Vercel is all about.

Guillermo: I'm the CEO and co-creator of Next.js, which is the React framework for front-end development and JAMstack development. Vercel is the platform for deploying projects like Next.js and many other frameworks. Vercel focuses on making the lives of front-end developers really, really easy, allowing them to push their pages to our edge network, and have a very delightful serverless development experience.

Jeremy: That's what I want to talk to you about today. The last time, I think, we saw each other in person was back in... Was it back in Milan, I think, right? Almost two years ago at this point, maybe it was last year. I don't even remember. Quarantine has lasted so long at this point that I can't keep track of time. The last time I saw you, I was speaking about this idea where I felt like serverless was getting harder and harder and harder.

That was or it seems to be the wrong approach, right? We want serverless to become easier. This is something where, I think, this idea of maybe I think you call it front-end serverless or serverless front-end is where you're trying to go with Vercel. I'd love to just get your thoughts on that, just that complexity that we're now pushing towards the back end, and where you're trying to go with the front end.

Guillermo: I think you nailed it. I think the serverless world is big and complicated. I think when we first met, we really connected on this idea of like, "What is even the right definition of it?" We were both presenting at Milan trying to give a definition for it. It's a pretty silly game to play to try to even fight that fight. When I think about serverless, I think about wanting to give people a very good recipe for leveraging that kind of technology.

I think anything that relates to serverless or infrastructure really needs to disappear. It has to be all about letting people focus on their products, focus on their pages, focusing on the things that they're publishing to the internet. That's why front end really is the place where, I think, all the serverless action is happening, and the techniques and technologies that we're using in some ways are the original serverless because much of what we're doing today is this idea of taking pages, generating them statically and putting them at the edge, which means...

To me, the most fundamental serverless technology out there is CDN. They've been around for a long time even they predate a lot of the serverless movement. Yet, they had that critical idea that there is no management to do, that it accelerates you, obviously, because it's putting your content next to your customers. The very technology that this accelerates is the front end. I think what we're about to see is that a lot of what we've been advocating for in the serverless world is really starting to become much of a reality with front-end developers.

Jeremy: I think that actually makes a ton of sense, because whenever I was thinking of serverless, I would always think about the actual computations that were happening behind the scenes, so whether that's something where you're running a Lambda function, and it's pushing it into SQS, and you're connecting to DynamoDB, and you're doing all these different things with the data. A lot of that is still necessary, right? There's a lot of complexity that has to happen behind the scenes in order to make a full-fledged serverless application run.

But I think the funny thing is that a vast majority of the applications you see out there are just a collection of static pages. That's, I mean, with a little bit of API happening in the background, but that shift, that thinking of compute versus static pages, isn't that really where we want serverless to go to is just this super easy precomputed system?

Guillermo:Yeah. I think a lot of people in the industry have over focused their attention on computing on demand, which is what Lambda enables, right? You're literally firing up a VM. It's amazing how easy AWS made it. It's almost like a miracle that you deploy your function so quickly, and it executes so quickly, and it's secure and in a VM sandbox, and their underlying technology is absolutely incredible with FireCracker, but the question that you have to take a step back and ask yourself is that do I really want to be computing so much? Do I want to be burning electricity and competing cycles so much?

This is where when we really sat down to analyze this problem, we realized the vast majority of pages that you visit every day on the internet can be computed once and then globally shared and distributed. So it's like the technique of memoization and functional programming where you compute once and then of course, you want to read it from that intrinsic automatic cache that you get, is different from caching because caching requires a lot of developer effort and thinking. Memoization gets closer to what I envisioned to be the foundation of serverless front end, which is basically static generation where the computation happens once probably as a result of some data pipeline, something that changes, computation happens. HTML is spit out.

That is all, and even in the case Vercel, it's powered by functions too by the way, but the funny thing is that the developer never even thinks about functions. They just think about building pages that then get pushed to the edge and then consumed by visitors. Now, that's not to say that the on-demand use case doesn't have any merit. Not everything can be computed statically. There's lots of pages where you sign in to a dashboard, and you have to query data that could absolutely not be cached. A great example is you log into your bank, and imagine that you were trying to statically generate your dashboard with your bank account balance, but you just want to check that your payment went through for utility.

You're not sure if what you're reading is up to date or not. You would go crazy, right? The movement of front end has also led us to where that dashboard is a single-page application, most likely, that is also served statically from the edge. Then there's JS code that runs on the client's side that then queries that back end. What we found is that front end is really powered by this set of statically computed pages that get downloaded very, very quickly to the device, some of which have data in line with them. This is where the leap of performance and availability just becomes really massive, because you're not going to a server every time you go to your news, your ecommerce, your whatever.
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