The rise and fall (and rise) of the CDN. App developers and vibe coders will never have to think about CDN and WAF as distinct appliances to purchase and configure. The CDN has been turned inside out: its configuration and caching are outputs of the deployment process and Git-driven. This is a major disruption. Enterprises are arriving to the same conclusion. As they modernize their apps, rewrite them in modern frameworks, and deploy to the cloud, they’ll realize their multi-year CDN contracts are technically redundant and predatory from a cost perspective, with non-transparent pricing and outdated configuration management (usually ClickOps, developer-hostile and professional services heavy). But how do we get to the promised land of full automation with optimal global distribution and efficiency? For Vercel this means to continue to invest in framework-defined infrastructure for net-new apps, but also smoothing the road to use Vercel as a pure CDN/WAF to facilitate incremental migrations. Their journey to a high performance, AI-native app will start one microfrontend at a time, with the rest of traffic proxied to the existing workloads. Over the past few weeks we’ve shipped very exciting CDN and security features: ▪Vary HTTP header support ▪1-click AI crawlers blocking ▪CDN-Cache-Control proxy support ▪Increased origin timeout to 120s ▪Better bot observability ▪Easier custom WAF rule creation ▪1-click Bot filter / challenging With lots more to come. Excited to be making all new apps fast and secure, while giving a clear path forward to the large and complex websites and apps we depend on every day.