The edge network of a Vercel/Netlify is very hard to replicate in cloud as a small startup.

And if you are spending your time and resources trying to replicate it instead of building your core product you're an idiot/forever software engineer clueless about product.

I wasn't referring to the edge network for _startups_ to replicate. I was more wondering how AWS and others can replicate Vercel/Netlify and eat their lunch. They have no defensible moat as a company.

The same reason IBM can’t. They are incumbent and have an enterprise world view. They are necessarily going to be more bloaty. IAM yay!

I use Vercel (and Netlify) and once you spend the 2 minutes setting it up you never think much of it again as it just does its job.

you could use Fastly or AWS Cloudfront

Vercel makes app deployment a first-class citizen that's baked into the CDN. Fastly doesn't offer a Vercel/Netlify deploy feature, and AWS requires considerably more work to setup but can easily replicate.

At the end of the day, even when it's running sever-side or on the edge, it still all exists to deliver a front-end experience. Vercel makes delivering such an experience more palatable. This includes isolated environments that can easily be shared and a CDN-as-default deploy model. It's like someone sprinkled a little Heroku magic on a specific front-end deployment workflow.

Until Vercel adds a solid and flexible database as a service, I'll continue using Google Cloud Run + Cloud SQL + Cloud Build for a "no server" solution.

Granted, the Vercel edge network is amazing, but Google routes internal requests way way faster than the edge can communicate with Google's infra.

Vercel is great for things that aren't stateful and for automagic build configuration and asset serving. But not great for anything needing a DB.

Vercel is easy to use and comes with batteries

the primary decision driver here is hype factor

it’s just more fashionable to use Vercel than AWS

much of web development today is like this

> Vercel is easy to use and comes with batteries

On our team, we deploy our web app through Vercel primarily because of this (maybe there is some hype factor bias in there too?..). Everything else we rely on runs on AWS. We don't necessarily need Vercel for any of the edge computing or serverless environments, but the experience of building, previewing, and deploying our app is FAR superior to AWS's Amplify offering because it just works.

Trialing Amplify for a few weeks led to a world of hurt, leftover build artifacts in our accounts, failed builds left and right, unreliable preview environments, etc.