We’re in the midst of the next big platform shift. Last generation we moved from server rooms to the cloud, and today we’re moving from the traditional, backend-oriented cloud to a new frontend cloud. The frontend cloud is characterized by performance: It enables both faster application development and faster end-user interactions. Each element is critical to success in today’s ultra-competitive software market.

At Clerk, we build authentication for the frontend cloud. We saw the need arise as frameworks and hosts tailored to the frontend cloud grew in popularity, especially Next.js and Vercel. Legacy authentication tools were not built frontend-first, and their technical architecture usually undermines the goal of speeding up end-user interactions, since they’re slow at the edge. Read more