Vercel is a developer platform for building and deploying web applications with an emphasis on frontend performance, Git-based CI/CD, preview deployments, and globally distributed delivery. The company is closely involved with the Next.js ecosystem and provides managed features such as serverless functions, edge functions/middleware, CDN delivery, analytics, and security controls.
In practice, teams use Vercel to:
- Deploy frontend applications (especially Next.js) quickly from Git.
- Automatically generate preview environments per branch/PR.
- Serve static and dynamic workloads via a combination of CDN, serverless functions, and edge runtime.
- Monitor frontend performance and manage rollouts.