// the find
piyushgarg-dev/vercel-clone
Vercel Clone From Scratch 🚀
A tutorial project that replicates the core of how Vercel works: an API server spins up AWS ECS tasks to clone and build repos, pushes output to S3, and a reverse proxy serves the static assets per subdomain. It's a companion to a YouTube series, not a production tool.
The architecture is sound and educational — ECS for isolated build tasks is exactly how you'd actually do this at small scale. Using Redis pub/sub to stream build logs to the frontend via Socket.io is a nice touch that makes the system feel live. The S3 subdomain proxy pattern correctly mirrors Vercel's actual static hosting model. For someone learning cloud infrastructure concepts, the three-service split makes the boundaries clear.
Last commit was May 2024 and it's clearly finished as a tutorial artifact, not maintained software. The 'TypeScript' label is misleading — the backend is plain JavaScript (.js files throughout), only the Next.js frontend uses TS. There's no authentication, no isolation between users' deployments, no cost controls on ECS task spawning — run this publicly and anyone can trigger unlimited builds on your AWS account. Setup requires manual ARN wiring through env vars with zero validation or error guidance.