From Docker to serverless at Vercel

The pivot happened in 2018 and became unmistakable by 2019, when ZEIT shifted from being known for shipping whole Docker based apps to pushing a model built around static sites plus serverless functions. The practical change was that developers stopped thinking about one long running container and started splitting frontend pages and backend endpoints into deploy artifacts that Vercel could package, scale, and route automatically.

• ZEIT rebranded to Vercel on April 21, 2020, and tied the new brand to a Jamstack workflow. That rebrand was really the public confirmation of a strategy that had already been underway, moving the company away from general app deployment and toward frontend plus serverless infrastructure.
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• A key milestone was April 30, 2019, when the company launched local development for serverless functions in vercel dev. By then, static sites and serverless functions living in the same repo were central enough to the product that local tooling was built around that workflow.
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• Next.js reinforced the shift on March 9, 2020 with getStaticProps and getServerSideProps. That gave developers a clean per page choice between static generation and on demand rendering, which fit Vercel's infrastructure model and helped make serverless feel like the default way to build a modern web app.
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Over the next five years, this same arc keeps pushing outward from serverless to edge execution. The likely outcome is that Next.js keeps abstracting deployment choices into page and function level defaults, while Vercel keeps turning distributed infrastructure into something that feels as simple as pushing to Git.