Netlify deploys hundreds of thousands of Next.js sites – here's what challenging (opens in new tab)

> Ah, the penny drops. The idea that you can’t run a traditional server and must rely on serverless vendor if you’re “serious”

That's not at all how you should read this. They later on give an example of exactly what kinds of problems you'll run into once you start needing to horizontally scale you Next.js servers (e.g. as pods in k8s, which is not serverless):

> The issue of stale data is trickier than it seems. For example, as each node has its own cache, if you use revalidatePath in your server action or route handler code, that code would run on just one of your nodes that happens to process that action/route, and only purge the cache for that node.

Seeing as a Node.js server running Next.js serving SSR or ISR (otherwise you'd just serve static files, which I personally prefer) is not known to have the greatest performance, you will quickly run into the need of needing to scale up your application once you hit any meaningful amount of traffic.

You can then try to keep scaling vertically to avoid the horizontal pains, but even that has limits seeing as Node.js is single-threaded, and will run into issues with the templating part of stringing together HTML simply taking too long (that is, compute will always block, only I/O can be yielded).

The common solution for this in Python, Ruby, and JS/Node.js is to run more instances of your program. Could be on the same machine still, but voila! you are now in horizontal scaling land, and will run into the cache issues mentioned above.

There was not really anything in the article that should have lead you to believe that this was a "serverless only" issue, so I think the bashing against Netlify here is quite unwarranted.

The ability to self-host on serverless compute is just a subset of the challenges. Even with your own VPS or ECS setup, I think it's legitimate to say a serious project requires server redundancy, and as soon as you have more than one running server it opens up requirements to synchronize cache state, which is a significant challenge. This has nothing to do with serverless architecture.

It's their whole business model, to convince developers that their walled garden is the only viable option. I've met a lot of newish developers that believe it too.

> suggesting that side stepping lock in altogether by simplifying down to traditional techniques is not “serious” makes me bristle a little

This is a strawman. You're misinterpreting the word "serious". They are using it to mean scalable, not about unimportance/ability. At some point in the scaling process, it will be more effective to scale to another machine than stay on a single one at which point you need a lot of other primitives like the article mentions. E.g. a shared cache with proper invalidation mechanisms. If you dont need scale, then you're right, you dont have to worry about this. I will also note that it is slightly odd to use a framework like next.js if you arent (or planning on) running at scale because most of its features (e.g. SSR) are entirely performance oriented. Essentially, the whole point of the article is that despite being "open source" you cannot run next.js at scale yourself without a massive investment of your own.

(disclaimer: I work at Netlify) It's not a 1:1 channel, we're pushing for as much work in the open as possible, and extending the OpenNext group to more members.

IMHO one major challenge is the amount of work one has to do to build an adapter, if we can make the spec leaner and move logic out of e.g. the CacheHandler, that's gonna make it easier for you to create your own (or you could state that some features/modes are not supported - but for that, you'd need to have a very good idea of what these even are)

This is a great point and definitely something we're mindful of. That sentence actually ended with "and share these with the community" in the draft, but we can't make promises on behalf of the Next.js team.

Our hope is that the OpenNext initiative's growth and connections with the Next.js team is just a first step toward shifting some Next.js governance out to the open. The article calls out that the OpenNext members are hoping to contribute to public RFCs in the future, with Next.js core team collaboration.

Unfortunately commercial companies tend to work behind closed doors/gardens. We are working on Low-Ops.com and would love to fully support NextJS. Self-hosting is the future :)

100%. The OP said he works for Netlify and this seems like a verbatim repost of theirs.