Vercel Ship 2024 recap

Vercel Ship 2024 was all about the power of the frontend cloud, highlighting the integrations, ecosystem, and teams building the web's best products.

This year we introduced some powerful features to enhance iteration velocity:

Improved platform and Next.js integrations for feature flags
Log, block, and challenge malicious traffic with the Vercel Firewall
New tools to improve iteration velocity in the Vercel Toolbar
React 19 support, improved caching, and more in the Next.js 15 Release Candidate
Further updates and improvements to v0 and the Vercel AI SDK

Working with feature flags on Vercel

Flags are now integrated into Vercel Web Analytics and logs. You can look at your site's page views or custom analytics events based on which feature flags were active, helping you better understand how your flags impact your users.

Applying feature flags in Vercel.

Plus, you can now try our new experimental design pattern for working with flags in Next.js (and soon SvelteKit). It encodes our best practices to help avoid the challenges of client-side experimentation and makes server-side experimentation much more approachable.

Introducing Vercel Firewall

The new Vercel Firewall.

Vercel Firewall allows you to create custom rules to log, block, challenge, or rate limit (beta) traffic. This application-aware firewall combines performance with simplified management:

Rules can be based on 15+ fields, including request path, user agent, IP address, JA4 fingerprint, geolocation, HTTP headers, and even target path
Firewall configuration changes propagate within 300ms globally. If you make a mistake, you can instantly rollback to previous rules

Vercel Toolbar improvements

We upgraded the Vercel Toolbar with new developer tools, including:

Open Graph preview: See exactly how your OG cards will look when shared on Slack or social platforms like X and LinkedIn
Accessibility audit: Complete accessibility audits on all your deployments where the Vercel Toolbar is enabled. Vercel will automatically check against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 Level A and AA rules
Interaction timing: Optimize your website's responsiveness and user experience by measuring and improving Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
Use the toolbar in production: You can now get the toolbar in your production environment without any configuration by installing the Vercel Chrome Extension, or by enabling the toolbar for your production domains right in the toolbar menu

Next.js 15 Release Candidate

The Next.js 15 Release Candidate (RC) is now available for early testing. This version introduces exciting features and improvements:

React feature integration: Support for React 19 RC, React Compiler (Experimental), and hydration error improvements
Caching: fetch requests, GET Route Handlers, and client navigations are no longer cached by default
Partial Prerendering (Experimental): New Layout and Page config option for incremental adoption
next/after (Experimental): New API to execute code after a response has finished streaming
Updates to create-next-app: Updated design and a new flag to enable Turbopack in local development
Bundling external packages (Stable): New config options for App and Pages Router

To install the Next.js 15 RC:

npm install next@rc react@rc react-dom@rc

Read the full post on the Next.js blog for more information, and stay tuned for the official Next.js 15 GA announcement.

v0

v0 helps you go from idea to UI in seconds, enabling you to generate React code from simple text prompts and images. We've made v0 even faster, more reliable, and more accessible by enhancing platform reliability and automatically adding ARIA attributes to generated code.

AI SDK

The Vercel AI SDK is a TypeScript library for building AI-powered applications with React, Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit, and more. The SDK is organized into three pillars:

AI SDK Core: A unified API to work with leading LLMs from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and Groq
AI SDK UI: For building streaming chatbots with minimal code
AI SDK RSC: Dynamic, component-based "Generative UI" experiences powered by AI

With the Vercel AI SDK, developers can easily build the intelligent web applications of the future.

Transforming the web together

Ship 2024 showcased the power of the web. To catch up on all the announcements, watch the Keynote, and stay tuned for recordings of the customer sessions coming next week.