A jamstack website is prebuilt for performance and deployed directly to Content Delivery Network – without any requirement to manage, scale, or patch any web servers. Jamstack websites are designed to make the web faster and to support the new tools and workflows used in modern web development.
What is Jamstack?
Jamstack is an architecture designed to make the web faster, more secure, and easier to scale.
The core principles of pre-rendering, and decoupling, enable sites and applications to be delivered with greater confidence and resilience than ever before.
Unlike the large legacy apps, Jamstack projects neatly separate the frontend pages and UI from the backend apps and databases. Freed from backend servers, the frontend can then be deployed globally, directly to a CDN.
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 which 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 thriving API economy has 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 utilize such services at build time, and also at 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.
Why Jamstack?
A Jamstack architecture can bring all sorts of benefits to the sites and to project workflows. Some of the key benefits are:
Security
The Jamstack removes multiple moving parts and systems from the hosting infrastructure resulting in fewer servers and systems to harden against attack.
Serving pages and assets as pre-generated files allows read-only hosting reducing attack vectors even further. Meanwhile dynamic tools and services can be provided by vendors with teams dedicated to securing their specific systems and providing high levels of service.
Scale
Popular architectures deal with heavy traffic loads by adding logic to cache popular views and resources. The Jamstack provides this by default. 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.
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 are already available on a CDN close to the user and ready to serve, very high performance is possible without introducing expensive or complex infrastructure.
Maintainability
When hosting complexity is reduced, so are maintenance tasks. A pre-generated site, being served directly from a simple host or directly from a CDN does not need a team of experts to “keep the lights on”.
The work was done during the build, so now the generated site is stable and can be hosted without servers which might require patching, updating and maintain.
Portability
Jamstack sites are pre-generated. That means that you can host them from a wide variety of hosting services and have greater ability to move them to your preferred host. Any simple static hosting solution should be able to serve a Jamstack site.
Developer Experience
Jamstack sites can be built with a wide variety of tools. They do not depend on the proprietary technologies or exotic and little known frameworks. Instead, they build on widely available tools and conventions. As a result, it’s not hard to find enthusiastic and talented developers who have the right skills to build with the Jamstack. Efficiency and effectiveness can propser.
Jamstack-Powered Projects
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