The thing is you can still stick a CDN in front of your old school servers and just use a 'stale-while-revalidate' header to get exactly the effect described here.
We do this, but if you're redeploying fast enough thre's a change that a user loads a cached old page (or performs a client-side navigation to an old page) and makes a requests for a URL that's no longer served by the origin nor is cached by the CDN.
Yeah, as a salty greybeard i tried to tell our FE tech-lead to just render the proper HTTP Cache-Control headers in the Next.js site we recently built. He tried and then linked me to https://nextjs.org/docs/app/guides/caching and various version of their docs on when you can and cannot set Cache-Control headers (e.g. https://nextjs.org/docs/app/api-reference/config/next-config...) and I got several hours of head-ache before calling it a problem for another day. That site is not high traffic enough to care but this is not the first time that i've gotten the "not the Next.js way" talk and was not happy.
I obviously can be done but clearly is not the intended solution which really bothers me
Well, part of the Vercel game is to lock you in to their platform and extract $$$, but as I recall you can spec out headers in NextJS config?. And possibly on CloudFlare itself via cache rules?
I am self hosting using Docker. Next.js config to change header didn't work for me. I had cache rules in Cloudflare, but Next.js header for page (no-cache) doesn't allow Cloudflare to apply stale-while-revalidate.
Now that I have proper header added by HAProxy, Cloudflare cache rules for stale-while-revalidate works.
If anyone can reach Cloudflare. Please let us forcefully use stale-while-revalidate even when upstream server tells otherwise.
