How to manage thousands of Next.js applications

[kristojorg]

I am currently working on a project that uses next.js to build an application that is to be deployed for thousands of clients around the US. 99% of these will be hosted and managed by us, not them.

My question is this: how would you all suggest I set up my project to make managing this as simple as possible? Options I've thought of:

1. Set up the application so that with one instance it will render different client apps at different urls like https://our-domain.com/client1 and https://our-domain.com/client2. This would have the benefit of only managing one next.js instance, which runs all of the apps. The downside is that the code will have to manage the complexity of having completely different apps at different urls, and deal with things like routing properly. The clients would then point eg https://app.their-domain.com to https://our-domain.com/client.
2. Simply render one client app per instance, and deploy that thousands of times. We deploy with docker on AWS currently. This would potentially be a lot of devops overhead. Thousands of docker-compose files to manage, etc. We would probably need to build some tooling to manage all of these. It also might be quite expensive.
3. Get the app to render static files, which can be deployed and managed easier than a server. However, we will have to rebuild the pages whenever something changes on the backend. Incremental Static Generation gets us part way there, but it doesn't actually solve the issue of either having thousands of next.js instances or one instance with the complexity to render many apps at different urls.

Does anyone have other suggestions? It feels like I might be overlooking something here. Is anyone else deploying next.js apps for many clients, and how are you managing it?