Vercel Ship 2025: Vercel's framework-defined approach to caching (Luba Kravchenko)

[Music] [Applause] hi everyone my name is Luba Kravchenko and I'm an engineer on the CDN content team here at Vercel my team focuses on building the infrastructure that makes your websites load fast no matter where your users are located at its core that means intelligently handling multiple layers of caching storing frequently accessed content

close to your users and shielding content close to your data the reason I'm at Vercel is a notoriously hard problem in computer science and today I'd like to simplify it down into the most essential complexity you need to know so that you can just ship things first a quick level set what exactly is

a CDN or content delivery network in short it's a global network of servers designed to rapidly deliver website content securely to users when someone visits your site a request comes in to the point of presence the POP closest to them which then routes them to the Vercel region closest to that where our CDN then handles that request in three phases first our

layered routing our layered firewall validates that the request is legitimate then our routing layer determines exactly what content needs to be served and finally our content layer determines how and from where that content should be served my team specifically focuses on that last piece efficiently delivering your content from any Vercel region as fast as possible

now I know that some of you may not frame what Vercel does as a CDN and that's probably because traditional CDNs involve a lot of setup and manual configuration the way I pitch my team's product is that we're a CDN with all the functionality you'd expect from one but we're also more than just a CDN before I explain what I mean by that I wanted to share a bit about my background when I first learned about

CDN's they were something I read about in a 20-year-old textbook to pass an exam i knew a lot of theory and I knew how to code so I became a product engineer i loved solving product problems with code i leveled up when I learned how I could solve more complex problems with infrastructure i made my first AWS account and sometime later I became an infrastructure engineer the whole time I found myself bouncing back

and forth between my code and infrastructure configs trying to figure out where a change needed to go and how to tie them together so everything just works and now Vercel I'm still kind of a product engineer but the product is frameworks and I'm solving framework problems with infrastructure and just like how you want the complexity of your website to be invisible for your customers we want

the complexity of the infrastructure that powers your website to be invisible yet intuitive for you it should just work it's what we call framework defined infrastructure and it's what makes our CDN more than just a CDN framework defined infrastructure means the framework bridges the gap between your code and the infrastructure that runs it you write your code push it to GitHub and at build time Vercel compiles