Everything You Need to Build Faster

Google's March 2024 rollout of Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a Core Web Vitals metric marks a new chapter in SEO, emphasizing real-world interactivity over traditional speed signals. INP captures the full lifecycle of a user’s interaction, making responsiveness a key driver of search rankings, user experience, and conversion rates. SEO teams that optimize for INP—especially on mobile—gain a measurable advantage in performance, engagement, and business impact.

“Bot Caching as an SEO Strategy — and a Safety Net,” explains how treating search bots as a distinct audience can significantly boost both SEO performance and site resilience. By implementing bot-specific caching — especially through Harper and Akamai’s edge-based architecture — companies can ensure faster indexing, maintain uptime during outages, and drive more reliable revenue, particularly during high-traffic events.

Harper is a unified, globally distributed web platform that combines database, cache, messaging, and application logic into a single runtime, eliminating the complexity of traditional multi-service stacks. Designed for latency-sensitive applications, it delivers ultra-low-latency performance, massive scalability, and seamless global synchronization—all in one simplified, developer-friendly architecture.

Harper's blog argues that web performance—especially fast load times measured by metrics like LCP—is critical to user engagement, revenue, and SEO. Traditional architectures often fall short, while “fused” stacks that bring compute and data closer to users enable sub-second speeds and better business outcomes. Performance isn't just technical polish—it’s a strategic advantage.

Harper’s Early Hints solution accelerates web performance by sending critical assets to browsers using HTTP 103 responses before the full page loads, improving Core Web Vitals, SEO, and conversions. Built on Harper’s fused architecture, it delivers sub-2 ms latency at scale with zero changes to application code.

The blog highlights a key contradiction in AI-powered e-commerce: smarter experiences often come with slower performance. Centralized architectures introduce latency that hurts user experience and revenue, especially when milliseconds matter. To solve this, AI must run at the edge—where vector search, semantic caching, and product logic are co-located—delivering instant, relevant results without routing through distant servers. By fusing intelligence with speed, edge-native AI turns performance into a competitive advantage.

Harper 4.6 introduces native vector indexing (HNSW), developer-first logging, and a plugins API—boosting semantic search, debugging, and modularity, all with minimal performance impact. Ideal for AI-native apps and scaling with ease.

Harper announces the launch of its open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, natively integrated into its data engine. This advancement delivers a high-performance, unified platform for LLM-native applications, enabling efficient, multi-modal context retrieval with minimal infrastructure overhead.

The post introduces Harper 4.6 and its new capabilities for semantic search at the edge, eliminating the need for separate vector stores and caches. It explains how this release simplifies AI-powered application stacks and boosts performance.

Harper 4.6 introduces vector indexing for AI-powered semantic search and caching, empowering brands to deliver faster, smarter digital experiences that boost engagement and drive conversions.

Discover how HarperDB's peer-to-peer data replication powers globally distributed, low-latency systems with no single point of failure. Learn to configure clusters, secure them with mTLS, and scale seamlessly using real-world examples and practical guides.

Discover what it really takes to self-host Next.js beyond just running next start. Learn how Harper reimagined the entire Next.js lifecycle—Develop, Build, Deploy, and Run—to support clustered, bare-metal environments with hot reload, rolling deploys, multi-zone support, and more.

Discover how event-driven database architecture unifies storage and real-time messaging. Harper’s MQTT topics make data updates instant and seamless.

This article is a holiday readiness guide for developers, offering practical tips to handle peak traffic and ensure fast, reliable shopping experiences. It highlights how Harper’s backend platform can optimize caching, search, personalization, and checkout while reducing infrastructure complexity and cost.

Harper revolutionizes GraphQL performance by fusing database, cache, application logic, and messaging into a single edge-native runtime—eliminating CDN cache misses, reducing backend strain, and slashing latency. With features like whole and partial query caching, real-time data freshness via CDC, and an incremental adoption path, Harper enables fast, scalable, and simplified GraphQL delivery without major rewrites.

Harper joins the OpenJS Foundation as a Silver Member, bringing its Node.js-powered composable application platform to the JavaScript community. With a focus on performance, open-source collaboration, and developer experience, Harper strengthens its commitment to advancing modern, distributed applications.

Harper is a high-performance backend platform that enhances both user and bot experiences with native pre-rendering, low-latency delivery, and resilient infrastructure. Unlike Botify, which focuses solely on SEO analytics and bot optimization, Harper empowers developers to improve Core Web Vitals and uptime directly at the infrastructure layer.

Harper enables normalized data to be a practical storage solution with minimal impact on read performance.

Macrometa's as-a-service offering limits global transactions per second (TPS) to 300. One node of HarperDB can handle 140,000 TPS.

Harper Pre-render transforms modern websites into ultra-fast, SEO-friendly experiences by generating and caching HTML ahead of time. It eliminates the drawbacks of client-side rendering, ensuring instant page loads for users and fully indexable content for search engines—at scale and with minimal backend strain.

Discover how resource hints like preload, preconnect, and Early Hints can dramatically boost web performance. Learn how each hint impacts key metrics like LCP and TTFB, with practical examples and implementation strategies to speed up page load and enhance user experience.

Microliths are an emerging software architecture that combine the simplicity and performance of monoliths with the modularity and scalability of microservices, offering vertically integrated units where application logic, database, cache, and APIs coexist in a single deployable runtime. This approach enables ultra-low-latency, secure, and composable systems with significantly less code and operational overhead, making it ideal for modern, data-intensive applications.

This article explores how to build a scalable, secure multi-tenant asset management system using Harper's blob storage, using the platform's unique latency advantages.