Next.js Architecture

A High-Performance Dance of CDNs and Kubernetes

Overview

Our NextJS framework-defined architecture delivers exceptional performance and cost efficiency through a carefully designed system of CDNs, Kubernetes clustering, and distributed caching. This document explains how these components work together to serve your application.

Global Content Delivery

Your application sits behind a global CDN that acts as the primary entry point for all incoming requests. This CDN intelligently processes the cache headers returned by NextJS (cache-control, stale-while-revalidate, etc), ensuring that as many requests as possible are served directly from the CDN's edge locations. The result is not just blazing-fast response times for your users, but also significant cost savings through our strategic CDN partnerships.

Application Deployment

We host your application in our scalable Kubernetes clusters. As request volume increases, our system automatically scales up your application's functions behind a load balancer. This ensures smooth handling of traffic spikes while maintaining consistent performance. The containerized nature of the deployment means your application runs in identical environments across all instances, eliminating environment-related issues.

Static Asset Management

Static assets are served through a dedicated CDN, accessible via a static- subdomain prefix. This separation is achieved by configuring the NextJS assetPrefix variable during build time (See configuring Next.js). Our default caching settings for static assets are optimized for common use cases, striking a balance between performance and freshness. Soon, you'll be able to customize these settings through our portal to match your specific needs.

Advanced Caching System

We've implemented a sophisticated caching system that's co-located with your application deployment. At its heart is a custom cache-handler.js file that enables your NextJS application to quickly read and write cache data using our global caching servers. This setup ensures optimal performance and allows us to scale your application seamlessly within our Kubernetes infrastructure.

Performance and Scaling

Performance optimization happens at multiple levels in our architecture. The CDN layer maximizes cache hits while ensuring content freshness. When traffic increases, your application scales horizontally in our Kubernetes clusters, with new instances spinning up automatically to meet demand. The multi-layered caching approach combines CDN-level caching for edge performance, application-level caching for dynamic content, and static asset caching for resource optimization.

Configuration Best Practices

Our system comes with sensible defaults, but it ultimately respects the settings inside of Next.js. In most cases the default Next.js settings will provide optimum performance. That said, you have full control via Next.js and any cache-headers and performance settings you configure will be respected by our framework-defined architecture