Next.js Weekly #6: Vercel Storage, Next.js 13.4, Server Actions, Caching, Highstorm, CockroachDB

Issue #6 // May 6, 2023 // Open web version

Welcome to the weekend special edition of Next.js Weekly! To ensure that we cover all the exciting updates from Vercel Ship, I've decided to shift this issue to today. So, whether you're enjoying your morning coffee or sipping on a refreshing Saturday afternoon Mimosa, get ready to dive into all the amazing news from last week.

Vercel Ship – The highlight of this week is undoubtedly Vercel Ship. Throughout the event, Vercel has released several exciting new features for the platform as well as for Next.js. Let’s dig through them:

Storage – The event started with the release of Vercel Storage, which includes three new services designed for storing various types of data. These services are Vercel KV, a serverless Redis store powered by Upstash, Vercel Postgres, powered by Neon, and Vercel Blob, an object storage solution powered by Cloudflare R2
Also check out:
- Vercel STORAGE??! SQL, KV, Files and more
- Vercel Markup: Compare Vercel pricing VS the underlying service
- Uploading files to Vercel’s blob storage 🤯
Spaces – Vercel Spaces are set of tools to make managing and collaborating on large mono repos more productive. It’s currently in beta and only available for enterprise customers but will be rolled out to Pro users in the future.
Visual Editing – Edit the content on your website like it’s a Google Docs. All changes get synced back to the headless CMS. Currently limited to Sanity.io (private beta) but Vercel is working on an open specification for content source-mapping that will enable any CMS to support this feature
Firewall & Secure Compute – Again just for enterprises: Vercel Firewall for DDoS mitigation and IP-blocking, Private connections with Vercel Secure Compute
Next.js 13.4 🎉 – Now it gets more interesting for Hobby users again. After being in beta for more than 6 month, with the release of Next.js 13.4, the app Directory is finally considered stable. That means you can now start using all the great features such as React Server Components, Nested Routes, Layouts and many more. Additionally experimental support for Server Actions were announced.
Also check out:
- Clerk brings Stable Support for App Router
- Server Actions (Alpha)

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📙 Tutorials, Articles & Opinion

This is why you need caching - Next.js, Upstash

🎥 This is why you need caching – Caching is essential for most applications. Take a look at Webdevcody's presentation where they demonstrate how caching improves performance using Upstash Redis and Next.js

// WEB DEV CODY

🐦 Highlights from migrating to App Router – I highly recommend checking out this thread by Guillermo Rauch where he gives an in-depth breakdown of the performance benefits of the App Router

// GUILLERMO RAUCH

Server Components vs. SSR in Next.js – This article does a great job explaining the differences between Server Components and Server Side Rendering in Next.js

// JAN KORIŤÁK

🎥 Building a Full-Stack Web App with Next.js 13 – Learn how to build a migraine tracking app from frontend to backend with Supabase and Next.js Router

// CODEWITHGUILLAUME

📦 Packages / Tools / Repos

Highstorm – An open-source, use-case agnostic event tracking tool. It’s built on top of Next.js app directory, Turborepo, Tinybird and PlanetScale.

// ANDREAS THOMAS

Templates for Vercel Storage – A collection of open source templates that you can use as reference for working with the new Vercel storage

// STEVEN TEY

OneStopShop – An open source online marketplace app built with all the latest tech: Next.js App Router, Clerk for authentication and Drizzle ORM

// JACK BLATCH

🌈 Related

Getting Started With CockroachDB, pg-promise and Next.js – This article is a couple of months old but it’s so well written that I had to include it. Moreover, it is always great to be aware of the available alternative database solutions

// PAUL SCANLON

Is React Context dying? – Ben Holmes explains why we might need React Context less due to the rise of React Server Components

// BEN HOLMES

Thoughts about Vercel’s strategy – This thread is an interesting thought piece on how Vercel is strategically position themselves with the new release of Vercel Storage

// DAX RAAD

Inspect and validate Open Graph metadata – You can now inspect and validate Open Graph images and metadata for your deployments directly from the Vercel dashboard

// VERCEL