What's JAMstack, and how I can benefit from using it?

Jonatan Salas

04 May, 2020 - 2 min read

JAMStack, is an acronym that stands for Javascript, APIs, and Markup.

In resumed words, JAMStack is a new way of building websites and apps that delivers better performance, higher security, lower cost of scaling, and a better developer experience.

Why JAMStack?

JAMStack has raised as a solution for building websites and apps without relying on maintaining one or multiple web servers.

Imagine that you have a high traffic website, and that website is made with a technology like WordPress.

To make it scale correctly you would add a plugin to generate a cached version of every page that your users could hit, and put a CDN in front of it to globally distribute that cached content.

That's pretty cool? Haha. Yeah, but, It's really necessary to have a server for rendering Markup? That's the question those guys who delivered JAMStack to the world made themselves.

Well, maybe not, maybe, you could render the pages for your website by introducing a build time step, the data would be pulled from an API (or any datasource you want), and with that you could obtain a set of pre-rendered markups that could be globally distributed using a CDN.

Well, that's the JAMStack way.

What benefits brings moving to the JAMStack model?

The benefits of using JAMStack are the following ones:

• Security: you only have a bunch of files that will be served from a CDN. So, the barrier for external attacks will be pretty lower, because you won't have an entry point to your servers anymore.
• Performance: pre-rendered markup files delivered from a CDN will always perform better than a SSR solution. In SSR the time for rendering the markup would be tied to the capabilities of your web server.
• Maintenance: no more servers dude, only a bunch of files!
• Infrastructure Costs:  maintaining a bunch of web servers is more expensive than serving files from a CDN.

So, what's JAMStack finally?

We can think of JAMStack as a high level framework (an architectural style) that provides a set of definitions on how to run, build, maintain and distribute websites and apps in a manner that will scale pretty well.

Well, that's all, in the following posts we will explore how to build JAMStack apps using Static Site Generators and Headless CMS.

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Jonatan Salas

Co-Founder and CEO at BlackBox Vision.