I haven't really followed Next.js and the related ecosystem closely, what does this project do exactly? If I look at Next.js docs [0], they have three options for self-hosting: using a Node server, using a Docker container or as an SPA. Is this project a wrapper around one of those or is it something else entirely? Or to perhaps ask differently, to me it seems you can already self-host Next.js, what's the value add of this specific project?

[0] https://nextjs.org/docs/pages/building-your-application/depl...

You can "self-host" as in `next build` and `next serve`, but it runs as a monolothic runtime. Next-on-vercel compiles each api route to a serverless function and supports various additional flavours of server side rendering of pages. Open Next is being able to run like Next-on-vercel but on AWS, your own infra, Cloudflare Workers, and others.

The reason this project is important is because Next.js is hard to deploy if you're not using Vercel to host your app. You can easily run into issues that are hard to resolve. It's creates lock-in with Vercel and is one of the reasons why Vercel has a bad rep.

In the company I just left, I actually went through the process two or so months ago of migrating their Vercel deployment to AWS. I evaluated several options that are listed on the website and on GitHub, and we landed on using OpenNext via SST, it was a low-pain effort, especially given the CTO's desire to also migrate off of Next.js.

As other commenters have touched on - my understanding is the purpose of OpenNext is to package the output artifacts of a Next build in a way that can be deployed to a serverless environment, analogous to how Vercel does it. The supporting projects like SST and the other links in the repo are to take those OpenNext artifacts and deploy them to infrastructure generally in an opinionated way - additionally supporting some of the "extra" features described in the repository.

The last project I was working on was to then migrate from SST to Fargate, as a persistent process (serverful?) deployment was preferable for various reasons. In that scenario, we would just be running the built in server using the Next.js standalone deployment mode (effectively a `node index.js`). We didn't need the extra functionality covered by OpenNext.

Confused as well since we self host in docker and it's no different than any other node app. People keep posting that there's gotchas and weird setups but... it just works well for us.

I believe the intent of OpenNext is to allow you to run your Next.js applications in a serverless manner, same as Vercel.