What Vercel is and its deployment model#

A platform for hosting the frontend#

Vercel is a cloud platform optimized for frontend applications — especially Next.js, which it created. Instead of configuring servers by hand, you connect a GitHub repository and Vercel builds and publishes the application itself on every push. At ProfessNet we deploy the ZEUS frontend (Next.js 15) precisely on Vercel.

The Git-driven deployment model#

At the heart of Vercel is tying deployment to Git. You don't upload files by hand — the commit decides what's in production.

Git event	What Vercel does
Push to the main branch	Builds and publishes Production
Push to another branch	Creates a Preview deployment
Opening a Pull Request	Generates a unique preview URL
Every subsequent commit	A new, independent build

This way each version has its own immutable address — it's easy to roll back to a previous deploy or show a client a change before it reaches production.

What Vercel does for you#

• Build — runs next build in an isolated environment.
• CDN — distributes static assets globally (Edge Network).
• Serverless / Edge Functions — runs API routes and SSR without a server you have to maintain.
• HTTPS — automatic TLS certificates for every domain.
• Rollback — return to an earlier deploy with one click.

# Locally you build with the same command Vercel uses
npm run build

How it differs from classic hosting#

On a traditional VPS you stand up the server yourself, configure Nginx, certificates, the Node process and the deploy. Vercel abstracts all of this away: you focus on the code and get the infrastructure as part of the package. Scaling is automatic — serverless functions spin up on demand.

Tip: Vercel is great for the frontend and lightweight APIs. A heavy backend (at ProfessNet the .NET ZEUS) we host separately — Vercel handles the Next.js layer and communicates with the backend over an API.

Plans and organizations#

We group projects within the ProfessNet Team/Organization, which gives shared access, roles and shared environment variables. Each project is one repository with its own build settings and domains.

Summary#

Vercel is a Git-driven platform for the frontend: you push code and get a built and published application with a global CDN and HTTPS. main is production, every other branch is a preview. In the next lessons we'll do a first Next.js deploy and set up a workflow with Pull Requests.