Vercel KV is a serverless Redis solution that’s easy and durable, powered by Upstash. With Vercel KV, it’s possible to generate Redis-compatible databases that can be written to and read from Vercel’s Edge Network in regions that you designate, requiring only minimal configuration.

Vercel Postgres is a serverless SQL database built for the frontend, powered by Neon. Vercel Postgres provides a completely managed, fault-tolerant, and highly scalable database that offers excellent performance and low latency for web applications. It’s specifically designed to work flawlessly with Next.js App Router and Server Components, as well as other frameworks like Nuxt and SvelteKit. This makes it easy to retrieve data from your Postgres database and use it to create dynamic content on the server with the same rapidity as static content.

Lastly, Vercel Blob enables users to upload and serve files at the edge, and is powered by Cloudflare R2. Vercel Blob can store files like images, PDFs, CSVs, or other unstructured data and it’s useful for files normally stored in an external file storage solution such as Amazon S3, files that are programmatically uploaded or generated in realtime, and more. 

“Frameworks have become powerful tools to manipulate backend primitives. Meanwhile, backend tools are being reimagined as frontend-native products. This convergence means bringing data to your application is easier than ever, and we wanted to remove the final friction point: getting started,” Vercel stated. 

Vercel KV, Vercel Postgres, and Vercel Blob are built on open standards and protocols, designed for low latency, efficient data fetching, and fully integrated with Vercel’s existing tools and workflows.

Additional details are available here. 

The post Vercel introduces a suite of serverless storage solutions appeared first on SD Times.

With this, users gain access to a redesigned approach to website layouts, data-fetching, and server-rendering. According to Vercel, Next.js 13 works to ship less JavaScript while also making ambitious updates possible and simplified.

This release also provides developers with a component toolkit that is intended to address common artifacts of the web such as images, font, scripts, and social cards.

This toolkit includes a new <image> component to optimize images on-demand for better performance as well as a new <font> module to optimize fonts and remove external network requests by doing away with connection setup times to third-party hosts.

Next.js 13 also includes Turbopack, the successor to Webpack. Turbopack is a Rust-based incremental bundler that draws on the lessons of build systems like Turborepo.

The goal of this is to enable enterprise businesses and developers to operate their sites more efficiently. 

In addition, the team at Vercel announced that it has acquired the analytics platform, Splitbee. With this, data is collected by the user’s own website rather than being collected by Google Analytics or another provider.

This acquisition is aimed at broadening developer analytics by allowing businesses to focus on traffic analysis and A/B testing. 

Lastly, the acquisition of Splitbee allows developers to leverage actual visitor data. According to Vercel, this provides users with a Real Experience Score and actionable insights in order to help upgrade post-launch workflow, and iterate until the desired performance is reached.

The post Vercel announces Next.js 13 along with the acquisition of Splitbee appeared first on SD Times.

The first beta of Android 12L includes improvements to functionality and user experience as well as several bug fixes, optimizations, and the December 2021 security patches. In addition, Beta 1 also includes the official 12L APIs, updated build tools, and system images for testing. 

Multitasking is also more powerful with 12L. Beta 1 includes a new taskbar on large screens that lets users instantly switch to favorite apps or drag-and-drop apps into split-screen mode. Android 12L in Beta 1 also has an improved compatibility mode with visual and stability improvements.

CloudBees raises $150 million in Series F

CloudBees, provider of an end-to-end continuous software delivery system, today announced that it has raised $150 million in Series F equity funding with a $1 billion valuation. Additionally, CloudBees closed a $95 million debt fallacy in order to accelerate growth. 

This influx of financing comes at a time of growth for CloudBees, with new CEO, Steven DeWitt joining the company back in February of this year. This funding will be used to invest in CloudBees’ employees, its product and solution, and developing global partnerships and scale. 

For more information, visit here.

MariaDB announces new release model 

MariaDB Corporation and MariaDB Foundation, providers of a SQL interface for accessing data, today announced a new release model for MariaDB Community Server. This release model centers around the goal of delivering new features and innovation to users of MariaDB globally. 

Under this new release model, a new community server release series will occur once every quarter, rather than once every year. This brings more opportunities for features and contributions to be brought to customers.

“The cloud has created an expectation of continuous innovation and deployment,” said Max Mether, co-founder and VP of server product management at MariaDB Corporation. “In addition, other successful open source projects… have adopted a similar frequent release model. By changing the release model, we’ll be able to meet today’s expectations for faster and more predictable innovation cycles for the MariaDB community.”

Vercel acquires Turborepo

Vercel, a platform to develop, preview, and ship websites as well as the creator of Next.js, today announced the acquisition of Turborepo, a high performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos.

Starting today, existing Turborepo users will have access to a migration path to move from Turborepo’s cloud-based caching infrastructure to Vercel. With this, Turborepo CLI is now open source under an MPL 2.0 license. Jared Palmer, creator of Turborepo, will continue to work on accelerating Turborepo’s capabilities and will now lead the build performance team at Vercel.

Axosoft becomes GitKraken; announces new CEO

GitKraken, provider of GitTools, recently announced that startup executive Matt Johnston has joined the organization as the new CEO. This comes among a year of milestones for the company, including announcing a formal name change from Axosoft to GitKraken. 

The decision to rebrand as GitKraken is aimed at reflecting the company’s present and future as a provider of several developer tools across the entire Git ecosystem. GitKraken’s suite of tools currently serves more than 10 million developers throughout 100,000 different organizations. 

These announcements come at a time of growth for GitKraken. The company’s recent acquisitions of GitLens and Git integration for Jira more than doubled the size of the organization, from forty employees to more than ninety. GitKraken also plans to hire over thirty more employees in Arizona and remotely by the end of 2022.

The post SD Times news digest: Android 12L in Beta 1; CloudBees raises $150 million in Series F; MariaDB announces new release model appeared first on SD Times.

New improvements include faster starts and changes, real-time feedback, live collaboration, and image optimizations. 

Vercel announced a preview of Next.js Live, which enables developers to develop in their web browsers. According to the company, this allows developers to collaborate and share with a URL, leading to faster feedback loops, less time spent waiting for builds, and real-time peer programming. 

The company also announced that the Aurora team at Google Chrome has created Conformance, which provides solutions and rules for optimal loading. Conformance offers script prioritization and font enhancement automations which can reduce First and Largest Contentful Paint times, enabling developers to improve Core Web Vitals scores. 

“At Google Chrome, we believe our collaboration with Next.js is an example of how to set predictable outcomes for loading performance,” said Houssein Djirdeh, developer advocate at Google. “We love working together with great frameworks to help developers make the web faster and we’re incredibly grateful for the maintainers and sponsors of the frameworks that enable the web to thrive. A special thanks to the Next.js team for testing with us and sharing the cost of many early attempts.”

Next.js 11 also adds a new tool to help developers migrate from Create React App to Next.js. According to Vercel, there has been an increase in these migrations over the past six months. The new tool adds a ‘pages/’ directory, moves CSS imports to the right location, and enables a Create React App compatibility mode which ensures patterns work with Next.js. 

In addition, with this release webpack 5 is now the default configuration for all Next.js applications. 

Image optimizations in this release include automatic size detection for local images and support for blur-up image placeholders to ease the transition from blank spaces to images. 

“Whether you’re starting with a single static page or deploying a dynamic site with billions of pages, Next.js is the hybrid framework that meets you where you are and grows with you,” said Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. “We believe the fastest and most enjoyable end-user experience must go hand in hand with the fastest and most enjoyable developer experience.”

The post Next.js 11 now available with new live collaboration features appeared first on SD Times.

The company explained in a blog post that it will use the $40 million in funding to further research and development, drive platform innovation, expand its global team, and improve user web experiences. 

“Since our inception, Vercel has been focused on creating the most powerful way to develop, preview and ship interactive web applications without having to depend on monolithic backend systems,” said Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel. “We are extremely pleased to have partnered with GV, whose experience in this space will help us grow as a company, rapidly expand our user base and ensure ever-higher quality of user experiences globally in the coming months.”

AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 released
AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 was built to make it easier for device builders to build, deploy and manage intelligent device software through a set of tools. 

The features include an open-source edge runtime, a rich set of pre-built software components, tools for local software development, and new features for managing software on large fleets of devices, the AWS team explained in a post.

Lightrun announces new integrations for real-time observability
Lightrun announced integrations with six popular developer and observability tools to improve its real-time production debugging capabilities. The new integrations are Datadog, IntelliJ IDEA, Logz.io, Prometheus, Slack and StatsD.

The Lightrun continuous observability and debugging platform enables developers to add log-lines performance metrics and traces to live production code and collects the information that is needed to fix a problem, according to the company.  

GitHub’s balanced employee intellectual property agreement  (BEIPA) 2.0
In creating the document, GitHub aims to help developers realize what they own and what they do not when they use their skills outside of work while contributing to open source. 

While BEIPA 1.0 made it clear that either employees or employers are the exclusive owners of IP created by the IP, version 2.0 focuses on how IPs that are created outside of an employee’s scale of work but related to that business. A recent post by GitHub showed all of the changes that were made in the new version. 

“We are confident that these changes are improvements that balance employee and company interests,” Mike Linksvayer, the head of developer policy wrote.  

The post SD Times news digest: Vercel raises $40 million to “build the next web,” AWS IoT Greengrass 20, and Lightrun’s new observability integrations appeared first on SD Times.