Life of a Vercel request: Application-aware routing

This post details how Vercel's application-aware gateway uses framework code to define routing and infrastructure, moving beyond traditional CDNs. It explains how domains act as aliases to deployments, and how de-aliasing enriches requests for an application-aware WAF. The post highlights instant global propagation for rollouts and rollbacks, and how this awareness enables optimized request fulfillment by returning early, serving from cache, or invoking compute based on application logic.