How Vercel thinks about Next.js

[Music] this is JS party your weekly celebration of JavaScript and the web if you like this show you will love the change log it's news on Mondays deep technical interviews on Wednesdays and on Fridays and awesome talk show that's a lot like JS party now that I'm thinking about it find us by searching for the change log wherever you listen to podcasts big thanks to our partners at fly to iio

launch your app in 5 minutes or less all around the world learn how at fly.io okay hey it is party time y'all what's up nerds I'm here with Kurt Mackey co-founder and CEO of fly you know we love fly so Kurt I want to talk to you about the magic of the cloud you have thoughts on this right right I think it's valuable to understand the magic behind a cloud because you can build better features for users basically if you'd understand that you can do a lot of stuff particularly now that people are doing llm stuff but you can do a lot of stuff if you get that and can be creative with it so when you

say clouds aren't magic because you're building a public Cloud for developers and you go on to explain exactly how it works what does that mean to you in some ways it means these all came from somewhere like there was a simpler time before clouds where we'd get a server at rackshack and we'd SSH or tnet into it even and put files somewhere and run the web servers ourselves to serve them up to users clouds are not Magic on top of

that they're just more complicated ways of doing those same things in a way that meets the needs of a lot of people instead of just one one of the things I think that people miss out on and a lot of this is actually because AWS and gcp have created such big blackbox abstractions like Lambda is really black boxy you can't like pick apart Lambda and see how it works from the outside you have to sort of just use what's there but the reality is like Lambda is not all that complicated it's just a modern way to launch little VMS and serve some requests from them and let them like kind of pause and resume and

free up like physical compute time the interesting thing about understanding how clouds work is it lets you build kind of features for your users you never would expect it and our canonical version of this for us is that like when we looked at how we wanted to isolate user code we decided to just expose this machines concept which is a much lower level abstraction Lambda that you could use to build Lambda on top of and what machines are is just these VMS that are designed to start really fast or designed to stop and and restart really fast or designed to suspend sort of like

your laptop does when it closes and resume really fast when you tell them to and what we found is that giving people this pram is actually there's like new apps being built that couldn't be built before specifically because we went so low level and made such a a minimal abstraction on top of generally like Linux kernel features a lot of our platform is actually just exposing a nice ux around Linux kernel features which I think is is kind of interesting but like you still need to understand what they're doing to get the most use out of them very cool okay so experience

the magic of fly and get told the secrets of fly because that's what they want you to do they want to share all the secrets behind the magic of the fly Cloud the cloud for productive developers the cloud for developers who ship learn more and get started for free at fly.io again fly.io [Music]

hello party people it's Jared your internet friend and today I have something special for you a one-on-one with myself of course and with Tom okino who is the chief product officer at Vercel Tom welcome to JS party thank you so much jar really good to be here appreciate you having me on the show you