With an update to Netlify’s On-demand Builders primitive, developers can experience the benefit of dramatically faster build times while maintaining exceptional page load times for end-users.
Earlier this year, Netlify announced early access for On-demand Builders, an open-framework solution to improve build times for large sites. Developers have been using On-demand Builders to generate pages and content on-the-fly and cache that content for future visitors.
Until now, On-demand Builders didn’t include guaranteed persistence across all global edge nodes. Some site visitors would experience a slower page load time if they were the first visitor in their geographic region to request the content.
Today’s update to the On-demand Builders beta introduces global persistence for content across all edge nodes. After the first initial request, all future visitors to pages or content generated by On-demand Builders will see reliably faster response times—regardless of their geographic locations.
Realizing the promise of Distributed Persistent Rendering
This update also represents a milestone moment as framework authors and developers can now achieve Distributed Persistent Rendering (DPR) on Netlify!
Since the RFC on Distributed Persistent Rendering was shared earlier this year, we’ve seen a lot of excitement around the proposal and we’ve even seen some faithful implementations of the concept, such as the introduction of Deferred Static Generation in Gatsby 4.
Now that On-demand Builders have persistence built-in, Netlify can recommend this primitive to achieve DPR.
Here’s how it works
If you’ve already been building with On-demand Builders, awesome! All you need to do to take advantage of the latest version is to change your routing from /.netlify/functions/myODB to point to /.netlify/builders/myODB.
Technically, every builder is a type of serverless function. You can write your builders with the same languages Netlify supports for serverless functions including JavaScript, TypeScript, and Go.
If this is your first foray into using ODBs, you can learn more about the benefits and usage patterns by checking out our documentation.
Use On-demand Builders with Next.js
While you could certainly take direct advantage of Netlify’s On-demand Builders as part of your site, it’s even easier for development teams to get started with On-demand Builders through our native framework support.
The latest version of the Essential Next.js plugin, the technology that powers native support for Next.js on Netlify, includes support for this release of On-demand Builders with persistence.
Read more about how to install the latest version and try this out today!
Try the newest version of On-demand Builders today
Ready to benefit from faster build times and improved performance for site visitors? Give On-demand Builders a try today! And make sure to hop over to the free Netlify support forums with any questions you have along the way.
For more complex use cases and questions, contact us to kick off a proof of concept. Netlify’s solutions engineering team is standing by and ready to help.
