Highlights:
- Two of the services are designed to make administering website data easier. Vercel Secure Compute, the third new offering, pledges to mitigate the threat posed by malicious network traffic.
- Neon, an open-source relational database created by the same venture-backed startup, serves as the basis for Vercel Postgres.
Recently, Vercel Inc. debuted three new cloud services designed to facilitate creating and maintaining websites for businesses.
Two services are designed to make administering website data easier. Vercel Secure Compute, the third new offering, pledges to mitigate the threat of malicious network traffic.
San Francisco-based Vercel offers a popular cloud infrastructure for website development and hosting. Its platform also simplifies tasks like performance troubleshooting. It claims to have thousands of customers, including the GitHub division of Microsoft Corporation, Meta Platforms Inc., and other significant technology companies.
Vercel KV, a serverless database service, is the first new offering introduced by the startup. It is a key-value store, a high-speed database that businesses frequently use to store website data. Because the service is serverless, developers are not required to administer the underlying infrastructure or perform related maintenance tasks.
Session state management is one of the tasks for which businesses employ key-value stores. Session state is the data generated by a user’s web browser while navigating a website. For instance, the user-generated data of an online store contains the items that customers add to their shopping carts.
Vercel KV can be used by businesses to maintain the session state of their websites. The service also supports additional use cases, such as rate limiting. The objective is to detect and resolve situations where a website receives more user requests than it can process.
Vercel KV is a replacement for Redis, the most prominent key-value store on the market. The startup has equipped its service with an application programming interface compatible with Redis to facilitate the transition. According to the startup, the API enables developers to migrate applications to Vercel KV without significant code modifications.
The service is being rolled out concurrently with a new database product named Vercel Postgres. It is a relational database designed to store information in rows and columns instead of a key-value store.
Similar to Vercel KV, Vercel Postgres is delivered without a server. It contains an auto-scaling mechanism that adds and removes infrastructural capacity in response to fluctuating website usage levels. Additionally, the service provides reliability enhancements designed to reduce the likelihood of outages.
Neon, an open-source relational database created by the same name venture-backed startup, serves as the basis for Vercel Postgres. Neon’s ability to independently scale compute and storage resources is one of its primary characteristics. The capability enables businesses to avoid providing more infrastructure than necessary for a website, thereby reducing costs.
In addition to introducing two new database services, Vercel also introduces a third utility called Vercel Secure Compute. According to the startup, the latter offering improves the security of websites with serverless features.
A serverless function is a piece of code that powers a single website feature. Such code fragments are utilized by developers to process login requests, provide shopping recommendations, and perform other duties. Many of the tasks performed by serverless functions involve data retrieval from a backend database.
Developers can designate a unique IP address to each serverless function on a website using Vercel Secure Compute. Then, they can configure the backend database of the website to only receive network requests from those specific IP addresses. Such a configuration automatically blocks network traffic from unknown sources, enhancing security.
