What is Vercel(ZEIT)?

The article is updated due to ZEIT is rebranding to Vercel

Hey y'all, hope everyone has a great week ahead. Today I discovered a very cool cloud deployment tool and wanted to share about it. I also removed some technical jargons in this article to make it easier for beginners to read! So, let's get started!

Vercel

Vercel with their mission - "To Make Cloud Computing Accessible To Everyone", which allows developers to deploy their web projects with minimal effort and maintenance.

What is Vercel? (The origin ZEIT Now)

Vercel(ZEIT Now) is a deployment tool by Vercel. It’s a hands-down seamless way to launch your web applications, docker containers or even static websites to the cloud platform. Moreover, Vercel is free (or Pay as you Grow plan) and light use even just for a beginner.

Personal Domain

Vercel also allows developers to set up their projects to their custom domain (or a free .now.sh suffixed URL) along with free automatic SSL which puts a protective cover to shared encrypted data between the server and browser.

Zero Config = Serverless

Vercel integrate directly with GitHub or GitLab as well. It allows developers to host static websites and web applications that deploy upon every push in branches or merge/pull requests to preview changes live. At the same time, it scales automatically, requires no orchestrate, operate and monitor, all with no configuration to the server. It also provides developers with a GUI(graphical symbols) or command-line(text only), to quickly spin up their projects on Verlcel platform.

What can I deploy?

Any web framework/frontend stack of your choice.
API endpoints that query databases or web APIs that return dynamic data.
Import your project from an existing GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket repository.
Select one of their optimized framework boilerplates and start from scratch.

Examples:
    - Node.js
    - Docker
    - Next.js
    - Gatsby
    - React, Vue, Angular
    - Go APIs

The Path Ahead for Vercel

Vercel is the easiest way to deploy any Jamstack site in 2020.

According to the community, it takes 15 seconds to get started with zero-config deployments, and Vercel unlimited usage Hobby plan is free.

Blog