Vercel today announced it has acquired Turborepo, a provider of a build system for JavaScript and TypeScript applications that provides developers with access to an easy-to-use monorepository for their code.
In the wake of that acquisition, the command line interface (CLI) for accessing Turborepo will now be available under an open source license.
Jared Palmer, creator of Turborepo and other popular open source projects including Formik and TSDX, will continue working on accelerating Turborepo’s capabilities as the new leader of a build performance team at Vercel.
The goal is to move existing users of the Turborepo cloud service to a Vercel platform for building applications using the Next.js framework, which makes it possible to build web applications based on the React library for creating user interfaces that enable both static site generation (SSG) and server-side rendering (SSR).
Palmer said monrepositories such as Turborepo not only make it easier for developers to manage builds but also reduce the amount of time required to process those builds using a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.
Rival build systems are also much more complex to configure and manage, which Palmer said is a primary reason many developers have not yet set up their own mononrepositories.
As the number of applications that organizations want to build and deploy in the digital business transformation era increases, the focus on developer productivity is intensifying. Rather than having to maintain a complex build system, Turborepo is designed to be simple to configure. As a result, more developers can reduce build times by as much as 50%, noted Palmer.
In effect, front-end developers are able to more easily become full-stack developers by combining that build system with the Next.js framework, he added.
DevOps teams will need to adjust to applications capable of providing richer application experiences without relying as much on backend infrastructure. That shift has implications for everything from the amount of network bandwidth consumed to the performance of web applications. The Vercel platform employs caching, routing and a React framework to optimize application performance in a way that reduces the dependency on backend infrastructure to optimize application performance.
As web application development continues to evolve, the overall rate at which they web apps are built should increase significantly. Naturally, DevOps teams will need to consider the implications of having more applications move through DevOps pipelines and the need to continuously update those after they are deployed.
It’s not clear whether or how much DevOps teams will nudge developers toward frameworks such as Next.js to develop web applications that might not tax backend infrastructure as much as previous generations of applications. In effect, developers can take advantage of frameworks that enable them to treat the underlying IT infrastructure as if it were serverless whenever possible with tools that have a familiar JavaScript construct. Vercel claimed there are already more than 30,000 sites running Next.js in production at organizations like Airbnb, Hulu, Nike, Ticketmaster and Uber.
One way or another, it’s clear that the way web applications are being built is fundamentally changing. The only issue now is determining to what degree the rest of the IT organization is prepared to absorb that level of change.