This seems like Google's version of Vercel, Netlify, AWS Amplify, Cloudflare Pages, etc. But especially Vercel, since they've expanded past basic Node hosting and integrated serverless workers, KV, Postgres, etc. – positioning them to be able to take on Firebase for some use cases.
I'm generally a fan of GCloud over AWS, but I don't see any advantage of this over Vercel. Vercel is way easier to use (as a dev) than anything I've seen in GCloud or Firebase. And them being behind Next.js means it's hard to find a better fit and feature parity (such as for automatic image optimizations) in other hosts... there's vendor lock-in, definitely, but with a much lower risk of overnight sunsetting.
This is a side project for Google that will probably disappear if/when it fails to pick up enough steam. For Vercel, this is their main line of business. Why should anyone choose Firebase?
Vercel has great products (both their hosting product and Next.js). If we look back far enough, some of Next.js’s most killer features (e.j. ISR) had tight coupling with their hosting platform. In the last year, Vercel has really upped their game. The Vercel-specific features are becoming encapsulated with replaceable delegates and Vercel has started differentiating with additional services. This is great! Vercel is innovating with new infrastructure (e.g. KV) while also increasing the portability of Next.js applications. We (Firebase) are going to use these more portable APIs to offer similar experiences and Google, Vercel, and others will differentiate on their IaaS ecosystem. This benefits developers immensely because it eliminates lock-in fears because Next.js will have proof of portability in market and you no longer have to couple your infrastructure and framework decision making. It’s a bright future for web developers in general!
Comments
This seems like Google's version of Vercel, Netlify, AWS Amplify, Cloudflare Pages, etc. But especially Vercel, since they've expanded past basic Node hosting and integrated serverless workers, KV, Postgres, etc. – positioning them to be able to take on Firebase for some use cases.
I'm generally a fan of GCloud over AWS, but I don't see any advantage of this over Vercel. Vercel is way easier to use (as a dev) than anything I've seen in GCloud or Firebase. And them being behind Next.js means it's hard to find a better fit and feature parity (such as for automatic image optimizations) in other hosts... there's vendor lock-in, definitely, but with a much lower risk of overnight sunsetting.
This is a side project for Google that will probably disappear if/when it fails to pick up enough steam. For Vercel, this is their main line of business. Why should anyone choose Firebase?
Vercel has great products (both their hosting product and Next.js). If we look back far enough, some of Next.js’s most killer features (e.j. ISR) had tight coupling with their hosting platform. In the last year, Vercel has really upped their game. The Vercel-specific features are becoming encapsulated with replaceable delegates and Vercel has started differentiating with additional services. This is great! Vercel is innovating with new infrastructure (e.g. KV) while also increasing the portability of Next.js applications. We (Firebase) are going to use these more portable APIs to offer similar experiences and Google, Vercel, and others will differentiate on their IaaS ecosystem. This benefits developers immensely because it eliminates lock-in fears because Next.js will have proof of portability in market and you no longer have to couple your infrastructure and framework decision making. It’s a bright future for web developers in general!