Architecting a live look at reliability: Stripe's viral Black Friday site | Customers | Vercel

What this post added

This post details how Stripe leveraged Vercel's framework-defined infrastructure, Next.js, SWR, and ISR to build a real-time microsite for Black Friday. Key technical decisions included opting for polling a backend cache with frequent rehydration over per-client WebSockets due to tight timelines and expected load. SWR was used for client-side real-time data management and background revalidation, while ISR automated revalidation of static content and propagated it across the Vercel Edge Network. A one-second max-age cache was chosen to balance fast initial loads with efficient handling of millions of requests by updating content in the background. The post also highlights Stripe's focus on isolation of the microsite's data sources from core infrastructure and a fallback strategy for real-time data streaming.