2022 Plans

[dphang]

Hello all! Happy new year and I hope everyone has hopefully had a good holiday and some time to recharge. I just wanted to give an update about Serverless Next.js, since it's a new year and I wanted you to know of my plans for 2022. There's both some good and bad news.

First some good news:

• We've been growing a lot (3.1k stars now, it was I think around 1k when I first started using it) and I've been thankful for being able to participate in such an interesting project. I'm also thankful for the community for all their feature contributions, bug fixes, and great discussions.
• Thanks to some financial sponsors, we have gotten some additional funds which can help for future costs such as paying for AWS costs, helping out contributors and so on.

Unfortunately, there are also some bad news:

• As some may have noticed, the original maintainer (Daniel Conde Marin) has since left the project late last year, so currently it's just me working on it.
• Unfortunately, I recently had some other personal projects/commitments in addition to a full-time job, so it's definitely been hard to find time recently for me to work on this.
• As the project grows, it's been quite hard to keep up especially since we still continue to emulate Next.js logic, and it is increasingly more complex, including maintaining deployment logic. And there's also demand for more platforms other than Lambda@Edge (for example, Lambda, Azure, GCP etc.). Unfortunately, it's hard to do all this mainly by myself.

With that said, for 2022 and beyond, there's still lots of good work to do and I'm definitely committed to maintaining this project, as I definitely still use it very much and think it's an interesting area.

• I'll continue to maintain Lambda@Edge and also commit to completing the Lambda integration since these are my expertise areas (since I previously worked at Amazon). However, I might not always have time to look at all the various bugs or features that may not be major.
• However, we will definitely try to get out of maintaining complex deployment logic. We aren't an infrastructure-as-code library, and it's been increasingly complex to maintain the existing deployment logic correctly (and there's been some issues due to breaking AWS changes). So, most likely I'm thinking we might stop using Serverless Components beta, as the abstractions actually make it less flexible than using things like CDK which allows you to configure almost everything. Plus, with Serverless Components GA, I believe it actually needs you to deploy code through their servers. Instead, I think the better path forward is to use proper IaC libraries like CDK, Terraform CDK, etc. In fact, there are also very interesting projects like Serverless Stack (https://github.com/serverless-stack/serverless-stack) that are trying to make Serverless deployments easier and more robust - for example, this builds CDK constructs on top of the lambda-at-edge package.
• Medium term, I am trying to figure out how we can make it easier to keep up with Next.js features instead of having to always emulate or reimplement them. One consideration is to try to use the Next.js server and/or share code as much as possible - however we will need to consider the impact on performance, considering this is a serverless environment and cold starts are important to manage.
• As always, PRs are always welcome at any time and I'll be available to review any code :)

In addition, since we have some more funds, I would love to invite contributors who would like to work on things with a little more commitment, and we could definitely provide some funds for various tasks and bigger projects. In particular, I am looking for people interested in the following areas:

• Expanding to different platforms (specifically Azure and GCP for now. For Cloudflare Workers - the environment is more limited so it doesn't seem quite feasible for now unless your website is purely static).
• Helping revamp documentation. Once we have more platforms, it will be more feasible to organize all docs in a docs site rather than on GitHub READMEs.
• Fixing existing bugs (we have 100+ issues)

If you are interested in joining in a more permanent/core capacity (at least a commitment of some hours a month), please let me know as well. I think we can offer a small stipend from the development funds. Students are most definitely welcome as well, and it's a great chance to gain some experience in what I think is one of the more cutting-edge areas (Serverless, React/Next.js, IaC)

Thank you for your time in reading this, and have a great 2022!