Frontend cloud takes center stage at Vercel Ship 2024

Vercel’s second annual Ship conference brought close to 1,000 attendees to New York City, with announcements focused on the frontend cloud. The event introduced updates across feature flagging, security, developer tooling, and the Next.js release candidate, all aimed at speeding up iteration.

Feature flags meet analytics and logs

Flags are now wired into Vercel Web Analytics and logs. Teams can segment page views and custom analytics events by which flags were active, giving a measurable view of how flags influence user behavior. Applying feature flags in Vercel. Applying feature flags in Vercel.

A new experimental design pattern for flags in Next.js—with SvelteKit support on the roadmap—encodes best practices for server-side experimentation while sidestepping the usual pitfalls of client-side approaches.

Vercel Firewall: app-aware traffic control

The Vercel Firewall layers custom rules on top of your application to log, block, challenge, or rate limit incoming requests in beta. The new Vercel Firewall. The new Vercel Firewall. Rules can target more than 15 fields, including request path, user agent, IP address, JA4 fingerprint, geolocation, and HTTP headers. Changes propagate globally in about 300 milliseconds, with instant rollback if a rule needs correcting.

Toolbar adds deeper inspection and production reach

The Vercel Toolbar gained several new development tools:

  • Open Graph preview: Inspect how OG cards will render on social platforms like X and LinkedIn before sharing.
  • Accessibility audit: Runs checks against WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA rules on deployments where the toolbar is enabled.
  • Interaction timing: Measures Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to help tune responsiveness.
  • Production availability: The toolbar can now run in production either through the Vercel Chrome extension or by enabling it for specific production domains from the toolbar menu—no extra configuration needed.

Next.js 15 Release Candidate

The Next.js 15 RC is available for early testing with several notable changes:

  • React 19 RC support, along with an experimental React Compiler and better hydration error messages.
  • Cache defaults updated: fetch requests, GET Route Handlers, and client navigations are no longer cached by default.
  • Partial Prerendering (experimental): Added a Layout and Page config option to adopt the feature incrementally.
  • next/after (experimental): An API to run code after a response finishes streaming.
  • Updated create-next-app with a new design and a flag enabling Turbopack in development.
  • External package bundling is now stable with new config options for both the App and Pages routers.

Install the RC with:

npm install next@rc react@rc react-dom@rc

Full details are in the Next.js blog post, with the stable release expected to follow later.