Episode 4 - JAMstack

JAMstack - Javascript, API's and Markup!

What is it?

• JAMStack: Javascript, API's and Markup
   
• Fast and secure sites and apps delivered by pre-rendering files
   and serving them directly from a CDN, removing the requirement
   to manage or run web server
   
• Any project that relies on a tight coupling between client and server is not built with the Jamstack
   
• Microservice/Serverless API's - not exclusive to either but consumption of external/loosely coupled services
   
• Can be used with static site generators but can be plain old HTML/JS (frameworks allowed! i.e. Angular/Vue/React)
   

Why would I use it?

• Why wait for pages to build on the fly when you can generate them at deploy time? When it comes to minimizing the time to first byte, nothing beats pre-built files served over a CDN
   
• When your deployment amounts to a stack of files that can be served anywhere, scaling is a matter of serving those files in more places. CDNs are perfect for this, and often include scaling in all of their plans
   
• With server-side processes abstracted into microservice APIs, surface areas for attacks are reduced. You can also leverage the domain expertise of specialist third-party services

Links

Official JAMstack website
Netlify: a good place to start with JAMstack
Introduction to Azure Static Web Apps
A great 30 min walkthrough of building an Azure static web app (JAMstack style!) with John Papa