Feat request: Make the frontend serverless

[johannesschaffer]

This way it would me much easier and cheaper to host it on e.g. Vercel & could potentially be deployed alongside/embedded inside the main website. Sanity.io has the option (their admin panel can be serverless deployd) and KeystoneJS is working on it (to embed the admin ui inside a Next.js app). The difficulty and cost related to deploying a node.js server is currently the only thing holding me back from using Payload over Contentful.
File storage would obviously be not possible this way, but cloud adapters to e.g. S3 already exist.

[mabry1985]

Yeah, this is why I ended up going with Webiny CMS over Payload. I love how Payload works, but I don't want to pay for a server that is only used for admin tasks. I would 100% switch back to Payload if this was sorted.

[johannesschaffer]

Given that all requests go through the "admin panel" (the server it is hosted on) this startup time is unacceptable (and I think you meant 250ms, right?😅)

[jmikrut]

😈 it's almost like 1.5.0 was leading up to something

[iakshay]

ah, yes 250ms. Will update the demo to see if things get better.

BTW - cold start should only be the first request. It may not be the worst thing if your whole website is statically generated and you only need to hit API for updating content. In those case using Vercel for embedded deployment might be perfect.

In cases where you do need to hit the API's, going with EC2 or DO seems like a better option to me - in terms of both cost and performance.

[johannesschaffer]

I wouldn't agree on cost (you get 100GB free per project on Vercel), but yeah, definetly for performance. DO App platform is what I'm doing at the moment. It's not just about the cost, though, but also the DX. Uploading to DO (also tried Heroko) was really a pain (they e.g. have that weird thing to not install dev depencies, which means teh payload scripts can't be run since they rely on e.g. cross-env). Vercel is literally one click, while DO took me 2.5h the first time 🙈

Also, it kinda sucks for development, where you don't pregenerate the sites. Having to wait the cold boot time on every site change completely ruins e.g. page transitions.

Given all that, I stil think it would be a godd idea to make the front-end truly serverless (I mean it's build with Next.js anyways, right? Probably wouldn't be so hard then, to at least give the option for people that don't need the local API?)

[jamesvclements]

@johannesschaffer how did you end up solving the cross-env issue for DO? I'm running in to that now trying to deploy on App Platform

[johannesschaffer]

I understand, given your local API, that you probably don't wanna make the front end serverless, though 🙈. The only thing I don't quite understand is the benefit of the local API given, that most websites, especially Next.js ones, are deployed serverlessly. I would consider the tradeoffs of making it serverless smaller than having the local API