Since its start, Azion’s main mission has been to power the hyper-connected economy by providing the world’s fastest edge computing platform that makes it easy for developers and companies to rapidly build and deploy serverless applications. We just added a new feature to our platform that will further increase your business agility and ensure that your team is able to innovate even faster: Next.js.
What Is Next.js?
Next.js is a framework based on Javascript’s React library that enables the creation of user-friendly, highly performant static websites that are also SEO optimized. Among the many advantages of Next.js is the fact that it is a minimalist framework that allows, with little code, to develop self-rendering React applications, statically exported React apps, and pages that are easy to build, deploy, and update. But what does this mean in the real world?
This means, for example, a much better UX, since using the powerful features of this framework, web developers do not need to stick to the multiple restrictions commonly imposed by platforms and CMSs. Furthermore, websites built with Next.js are based on static content, which dramatically increases the delivery speed, as well as adds an extra layer of security, as static content does not depend on direct connections to databases or other dependencies.
Next.js also excels in utilizing two tools that can significantly improve your page’s user experience and SEO: SSG (Static Site Generation) and SSR (Server-Side Rendering).
So, by combining an efficient Jamstack architecture (which is widely used in our edge platform), the powerful Next.js framework, and our cutting-edge CLI, Azion’s platform provides you with all the necessary conditions to innovate and grow with agility, right at the edge.
Next.js on Azion Edge Platform
Using Next.js on Azion’s platform will allow you to develop even more robust solutions. And when it comes to a modern, secure edge platform with over 100 edge locations around the world, calling these solutions “powerful” is by no means an exaggeration.
The global market has always been an environment of uncertainty and constant change. Geopolitical, economic, cultural, technological, and even climatic conditions can change market needs abruptly and give rise, overnight, to challenges that require quick and innovative solutions.
However, the time required to plan, develop, implement, and deliver these solutions is one of the main factors preventing companies from keeping up. Oftentimes, when the solution is finally ready to be used, the market no longer needs it, normally because a competitor was able to deliver the same solution more quickly.
And that’s why one of Azion’s main goals is to create the necessary conditions for our users to idealize, implement, and distribute the most innovative solutions in a few days (or even hours), and integrating with Next.js is a great move for doing so.
Business Agility
Considering that companies are more than mere numbers, but the investment of resources, time, and talent of one person or huge groups of professionals, business agility has never been more important. And Next.js running on Azion’s platform allows you to save precious time that can guarantee your company’s survival and growth.
- Faster Time-to-Market for New Products and Features
As should be clear by now, Next.js makes it simple and quick to build increasingly complex pages and applications. This allows businesses the agility to respond quickly to changing market conditions. New products, features, and functionalities can be launched in hours and days. Different versions of websites and services can be rapidly tested using A/B testing to optimize business results. Furthermore, providing differentiated customer experiences through capabilities such as personalization becomes a lot easier.
But the benefits are not just restricted to building applications faster. The deployment also becomes fast and effortless and our highly distributed edge network ensures that this implementation or future updates will be quickly and widely applied to all our edge locations — within seconds. Thus, the development and implementation time of an MVP, as well as its future enhancements and scalability, are drastically reduced.
By doing so, we can significantly reduce the time gap that your technical team needs to deliver business value. That makes it finally possible for your team to keep up with the fast, constant changes in the market, at the speed your business needs to keep competitive.
- A Minimal Latency
Applications developed with Next.js are, by nature, extremely fast. However, if the web pages are rendered and delivered from thousands of miles away servers, the user experience will still be very poor since data can’t travel faster than the speed of light.
But if you use Next.js applications on the Azion edge network, these problems can be easily mitigated. The Azion edge platform renders the web page, caches the static page, and delivers it to users — all from a location that is only milliseconds away from your customers. In today’s digital world, milliseconds matter because they can be the difference between your business’s success and failure.
Besides that, by using our Edge Functions you can also create dynamic content with event-driven functions that also run in milliseconds at the edge location that is closest to your user. This means you don’t have to give up any features or content — whether static or dynamic — to deliver the best user experience on the market.
- Security is Fundamental
If you’ve been in the tech industry for more than a week (actually, if you work at any company with an online presence), you should know that data breaches and denial-of-service attacks can be even more damaging to your business than a high latency. And Azion hasn’t forgotten this.
Our edge platform already has the most advanced security mechanisms on the market, with a complete stack of solutions that act from authentication to bot mitigation. Now, in addition to all that, you can also count on the effectiveness of Next.js in protecting your data.
As we learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, the more contact we have with people, environments, or other risk factors, the more chance we have of being infected by this or any other virus. In the data world, the situation is no different: the more requests your application makes to the database, the more exposed your entire infrastructure is.
But when rendering happens at building time or on the server side, however, requests to the data center are drastically reduced, as the static HTML page delivered to the client does not perform the constant requests that a Javascript function would. This reduces exposure to risk factors and agents and limits the “contact surface” of the data center, which consequently mitigates a huge percentage of the risks of intrusion and attacks.
- Developer Experience
The mere existence of pages like Should I Deploy Today?[1] — which uses information from GitHub to indicate, in a playful way, whether a specific moment is right to implement an application — reminds us that the developer’s work goes far beyond the coding.
Planning, writing the code, testing, debugging, retesting, making compromises (admit it, you’ve already compromised with your code), testing again, and only then deploying an application is a process that can take weeks (or even months!). In the midst of all this, the dev wastes precious energy that would be much better spent on creating innovative solutions much faster.
And Next.js also excels in this aspect.
On the Azion Edge Platform, developers have a simple and powerful CLI that allows them to provision Next.js applications with just a few commands. These applications can also be tested and patched without the need for a previous implementation, which reduces the number of times they need to check the valuable advice from Should I Deploy Today? And when everything is good to go, it will also take only a few commands to implement the application in all our more than 100 edge locations simultaneously.
If you want to learn more about how easy it is to use Next.js on the Azion platform, check out our technical documentation page.
Azion Is a Platform for Those Who Don’t Have Any Time to Waste
We’re going to do a brief exercise in logic here.
As a platform that guarantees unparalleled content processing and delivery speed, in addition to cutting-edge security and 100% uptime, we can consider Azion as a platform for those who have no time to waste.
But as we discussed above, in the hyper-connected economy and in a society that won’t wait more than a few seconds to make very important decisions, we can also say that today, no one has any time to waste.
So, if Azion is a platform for those who don’t have time to waste and, nowadays, nobody has time to waste, what conclusion do we come to? That’s right, your Math and/or Philosophy teachers would be so proud: Azion is a platform for everyone.
Think this is just rhetorical? Take a look at the arguments below and leave a comment at the end if we managed to convince you :D
Our solutions
Azion speeds up your business, your growth, and your profits by accelerating the way you build, secure, deliver, and observe your serverless applications with innovative, increasingly indispensable solutions.
- Application Acceleration: the Edge Application module that accelerates the performance of your applications and APIs with protocol optimizations and advanced caching rules;
- Edge Cache: optimizes content delivery with caching at the edge of the network, closer to users;
- Image Processor: optimizes, converts, and treats images just-in-time to improve the user experience;
- Azion Marketplace: a digital catalog that makes it easy to find, test, and deploy edge-enabled software in just a few clicks.
The Revolution Has Already Started. Azion Gives You The Speed You Need to Keep Up
You know that a revolution is not self-made. It is about the union of people, forces, and resources oriented towards the same objective of transformation and breaking of paradigms. That’s why Azion has brought together the best tools and features to help you be an increasingly important player in our hyper-connected economy — and we are putting out all our efforts so that you have the tools you need to become a leader in your industry.
How about you talk to one of our experts now to join the transformation of the digital world we live and work in? The future has already begun — but don’t worry: with Azion, you won’t be left behind.
