From Kubernetes to CI/CD out of the box

Sanity's marketing site originally launched in 2017 on a custom SSR React framework, Docker, and Google Cloud Platform. That stack carried real operational weight—every issue meant pulling in an already-overloaded site reliability engineering team. When Sanity rebuilt the site in Next.js in 2018, moving to Vercel removed that burden entirely.

“The switch from Google Cloud Platform to Vercel has allowed our engineers to go from spending their time managing and troubleshooting Kubernetes clusters to building more unique features for our customers.”

The migration was nearly frictionless, according to the team, who credit Vercel's backwards compatibility—even older configuration files worked as-is. Common but tedious tasks like domain setup, SSL certificates, and deployment previews were handled automatically. Pointing Vercel at a GitHub repository yielded CI/CD immediately, and fetching form data from Marketo's API worked without issue.

Preview Deployments also changed how the team collaborates. Sharing a project with non-technical stakeholders is now as simple as sending a link, letting them click through real pages before anything ships. Knut Melvær, Head of Developer Relations at Sanity, calls that social aspect a key driver of the final product's quality.

Experimenting without the client-side cost

Edge Middleware is a particular favorite for Sanity's developers, who use it to run A/B tests without any visible disruption to the end user. Just this summer, the team ran over eight tests through this mechanism—optimizing the new-user onboarding flow and testing different CTA buttons to push higher-quality leads to the sales team. They're also planning personalization work with AT&T using Edge Middleware.

Sanity pairs its Vercel setup with Checkly for end-to-end testing, which the developers say has "saved them several times." Combined with Vercel's performance checks, the team gets confidence that both their main site and their experiments will hold up under real traffic. The result is a fast marketing site that serves users well while giving engineers room to keep iterating.