What is Jamstack?

Jamstack is an approach to frontend web development (the construction of content and interfaces that users interact with). It allows developers to quickly create and efficiently serve static websites to users.

In a Jamstack web application, as much HTML as possible is pre-built and stored in a content delivery network (CDN). Instead of running a monolithic backend application on the server-side to generate dynamic content, dynamic components of the application are based on APIs. Ideally, this results in a much faster user experience and a much simpler developer experience.

What does the term 'Jamstack' stand for?

JAM stands for JavaScript, APIs, Markup.

• JavaScript is the programming language used by web applications
• An API (application programming interface) is a way to request data from someone else's program or application
• Markup is code (HTML and CSS) that provides formatting instructions to browsers

Stack refers to the combination of all these things that allow developers to build applications and websites.

A Jamstack website or application is constructed using only these three elements. The static website that the user sees is built out of HTML and CSS markup code. JavaScript is used for any necessary dynamic functionality, and for calling APIs. APIs provide the application's backend.

Why Jamstack?

A Jamstack architecture can bring all sorts of benefits to the sites and 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 that require patching, updating, and maintaining.

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.

Bye-bye infrastructure lock-in.

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 prosper.

About Me 👨‍💻

I'm Faiz A. Farooqui. Software Engineer from Bengaluru, India. Find out more about me @ faizahmed.in