Sam and Ryan talk about how frameworks and infrastructure evolve with each other, using Next.js as a representative example. They discuss how hosting providers like Heroku have always imposed certain constraints on apps, what features those constraints enable hosting providers to support, how burdensome those constraints are across different frameworks, and how frameworks that add infra-specific APIs can best communicate the costs of those APIs and benefits they enable.

Timestamps:

• 0:00 - Intro
• 3:03 - Heroku and the Twelve-Factor App
• 7:39 - GitHub Pages and static sites
• 13:57 - Serverless and JAMstack
• 17:30 - Vercel and CDNs, self-hosting, and Next.js
• 19:00 - How framework APIs can nudge an app towards a particular hosting solution
• 23:09 - What constraints does Next.js impose on your app (e.g. middleware doesn't run node), and what benefits do those constraints give you?
• 36:13 - How Next.js APIs are motivated by wanting to tease apart static and dynamic code, in an attempt to support the needs of any web app with a single stack
• 40:33 - What is the relationship between frameworks and infra?
• 47:37 - How can frameworks that add infra-specific APIs best communicate the costs of those APIs and the benefits they enable?

Links:

• The Twelve-Factor App