The user experience of the Frontend Cloud

This post details how Vercel's Frontend Cloud leverages its Edge Network to achieve both speed and personalization. It explains the limitations of traditional CDNs and how Vercel's Edge Network extends caching to dynamic requests. It highlights Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) as a mechanism for granular, on-demand content updates, reducing build times and enabling content previews. The post also outlines the lifecycle of a user request within the Edge Network, detailing caching layers (TLS, hostname lookup, deployment fetching, routing, in-memory storage) and how serverless functions are integrated for dynamic data, ultimately optimizing TTFB and developer experience.