Vercel is giving developers more options for running their backends on its platform.

At its Ship conference in San Francisco on Thursday, the company introduced Daemons, a new service for continuously running background workers, and made its Python support generally available.

It also made Drives, its persistent storage for AI agents, generally available.

Daemons, which is now in public beta, lets developers deploy a container and specify how many instances should run in each region. Vercel makes sure those processes keep running and restarts them if they exit or crash. At launch, it supports pull-based workloads that allow workers to fetch jobs from a queue or database and then process them as they arrive.

Vercel CTO Malte Ubl tells The New Stack that the company’s current push in terms of going further down the stack.

“Let’s look at what people are doing, and let’s make sure that a larger chunk of them could just only use Vercel as their infrastructure provider,” he says.

The company already offers queues and durable workflows, while its Services feature lets developers deploy frontends and backends together.

These features cover request-driven work, Ubl says, but not everything a sophisticated backend does. “What really doesn’t fit well into that bucket is what you do find in sophisticated backend workloads,” he says, “where you want to do essentially processing on some kind of queue,” he says.

He uses Vercel’s own deployment pipeline as an example for that kind of workload.

“When you call our API to make a deployment, we don’t do that deployment in that process that handles your request, because we can’t actually do an infinite number of concurrent deployments,” Ubl says.

Source link