What Is JAMStack
Jamstack is an architectural approach that decouples the web experience layer from data and business logic, improving flexibility, scalability, performance, and maintainability.
It enables a composable architecture for the web where custom logic and 3rd party services are consumed through APIs.
The core principles of pre-rendering, and decoupling, enable sites and applications to be delivered with greater confidence and resilience than ever before.
Advantages
Pre-rendering
With Jamstack, the entire front end is prebuilt into highly optimized static pages and assets during a build process. This process of pre-rendering results in sites that can be served directly from a CDN, reducing the cost, complexity and risk, of dynamic servers as critical infrastructure.
With so many popular tools for generating sites, like Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll, Eleventy, NextJS, and very many more, many web developers are already familiar with the tools needed to become productive Jamstack developers.
Enhancing with JavaScript
With the markup and other user interface assets of Jamstack sites served directly from a CDN, they can be delivered very quickly and securely. On this foundation, Jamstack sites can use JavaScript and APIs to talk to backend services, allowing experiences to be enhanced and personalized.
Supercharging with services
The APIs have become a significant enabler for Jamstack sites. The ability to leverage domain experts who offer their products and service via APIs has allowed teams to build far more complex applications than if they were to take on the risk and burden of such capabilities themselves. Now we can outsource things like authentication and identity, payments, content management, data services, search, and much more.
Jamstack sites might utilise such services at build time, and also at a run time directly from the browser via JavaScript. And the clean decoupling of these services allows for greater portability and flexibility, as well as significantly reduced risk.
Performance
Page loading speeds have an impact on user experience and conversion. Jamstack sites remove the need to generate page views on a server at request time by instead generating pages ahead of time during a build.
With all the pages already available on a CDN close to the user and ready to serve, very high performance is possible without introducing expensive or complex infrastructure.
Scale
When sites can be served entirely from a CDN there is no complex logic or workflow to determine what assets can be cached and when.
With Jamstack sites, everything can be cached in a content delivery network. With simpler deployments, built-in redundancy and incredible load capacity.
Advantages
- Cheap to host the project. APIs can be deployed to AWS, Google cloud functions etc A static host like S3 is enough.
- Javascript, HTML & CSS knowledge
- No CMS is required. Static site generators are enough. Markdown is easy to learn. Re-generate the page whenever content changes.
- Great SEO and Performance advantages.
Summary
Some of the largest websites and apps are built on Jamstack, and more and more industries are represented in Jamstack development.
In other words, the Jamstack is touching all industries. It’s the new way to build applications and websites, and it’s where the industry is going.
Even more, it’s a thriving community that is growing fast as a wave of mainstream adoption continues, driven by fantastic scaling, high performance, and workflows and tooling that developers love.
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