Vercel Inc. today debuted three new cloud services aimed at making it easier for companies to build and maintain websites.

Two of the services are designed to simplify the task of managing website data. The third new offering, Vercel Secure Compute, promises to mitigate the risk posed by malicious network traffic. 

San Francisco-based Vercel provides a popular cloud platform for developing and hosting websites. Its platform also eases related tasks, such as troubleshooting performance issues. It says it has thousands of customers, including Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub unit, Meta Platforms Inc. and other major tech firms.

The first new offering that the startup debuted today is a serverless database service called Vercel KV. It’s a key-value store, a type of high-speed database that companies often use to store data from their websites. Because it’s delivered on a serverless basis, the service doesn’t require developers to manage the underlying infrastructure or perform-related maintenance chores. 

One of the tasks for which companies use key-value stores is session state management. Session state is the data that users generate while browsing a website. The user-generated data of an online store, for example, includes the items that shoppers add to their cart.

Companies can use Vercel KV to store their websites’ session state. The service also lends itself to other use cases, including rate limiting. That’s the task of detecting and remediating situations where a website receives more user requests than it can process.

Vercel KV is designed as an alternative to Redis, the most popular key-value store on the market. To help developers make the switch, the startup has equipped its service with a Redis-compatible application programming interface. The API enables developers to move applications to Vercel KV without making major code changes, according to the startup.

The service is rolling out alongside another new database offering called Vercel Postgres. It’s not a key-value store, but rather a relational database designed to store information organized into rows and columns.

Like Vercel KV, Vercel Postgres is delivered on a serverless basis. It includes an autoscaling mechanism that adds and removes infrastructure capacity as website usage levels change. The service also provides reliability optimizations meant to reduce the risk of outages.

Vercel Postgres is based on Neon, an open-source relational database developed by a venture-backed startup of the same name. One of Neon’s main features is its ability to scale compute and storage resources separately. The capability helps companies avoid provisioning more infrastructure than they require for a website, which reduces costs.

Vercel is launching its two new database services alongside a third tool called Vercel Secure Compute. According to the startup, the latter offering can improve the security of websites that incorporate serverless functions. 

A serverless function is a snippet of code that powers one specific feature of a website. Developers use such code snippets to process login requests, deliver shopping recommendations and perform other tasks. Many of the tasks that serverless functions perform involve retrieving data from a backend database. 

Vercel Secure Compute allows developers to assign a unique IP address to each serverless function in a website. Then, they can configure the website’s backend database to accept network requests only from those unique IP addresses. Such a configuration makes it possible to automatically block network traffic from unknown sources, which improves security. 

Image: Vercel