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Vercel's Edge Network enables you to store content close to your customers and run compute in regions close to your data, reducing latency and improving end-user performance.

Our Edge Network is both a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a globally distributed platform for running compute in regions around the globe.

If you're deploying an app on Vercel, you're already using our Edge Network. These docs will teach how to optimize your apps and deployment configuration to get the best performance for your use-case.

Vercel's Edge Network uses routing rules to determine how to handle incoming requests, set headers, and cache responses. The following can be configured through Vercel Functions or the vercel.json configuration file:

  • Redirects: Redirects are used to tell the client to make a new request to a different URL, useful for enforcing HTTPS, redirecting users, and directing traffic
  • Rewrites: Rewrites internally change the URL the server uses to fetch the requested resource, allowing for dynamic content and improved routing
  • Headers: Headers are used to modify the request and response headers, allowing for improved security, performance, and functionality

Vercel's Edge Network stores content and runs compute in many regions around the world for optimal performance.

Vercel's Edge Network caches your content at the edge in order to serve data to your users as fast as possible.

Vercel's Edge Network supports streaming API responses with Edge and Serverless Functions. Streaming data enables you to improve your users' perception of your app's speed and performance.

Aside from routing your requests to the correct destination, the Edge Network also takes care of a few other important aspects of a working Deployment:

All of these actions are performed automatically with careful attention to performance (ensured by our choices of technology). In turn, we highly recommend not implementing SSL termination or compression in your own code, as it would be unnecessary.

The Edge Network supports the following protocols (negotiated with ALPN):

Vercel supports of 35 frontend frameworks. These frameworks provide a local development environment used to test your app before deploying to Vercel.

Through framework-defined infrastructure, Vercel then transforms your framework build outputs into globally managed infrastructure for production.

If you are using Vercel Functions or other compute on Vercel without a framework, you can use the Vercel CLI to test your code locally with vercel dev.

While sometimes necessary, proceed with caution when you place another CDN in front of Vercel:

  • Vercel's Edge Network is designed to deploy new releases of your site without downtime by purging the Edge Network cache globally and replacing the current deployment
  • If you use an additional CDN in front of Vercel, it can cause issues because Vercel has no control over the other provider, leading to the serving of stale content or returning 404 errors
  • To avoid these problems while still using another CDN, we recommend you either configure a short cache time or disabling the cache entirely. Check the documentation for your preferred CDN to learn how to do either option
Last updated on February 28, 2023