About Jamstack

Let's jump into Jamstack. You can find a lot of information on jamstack.org but Jamstack stands for the tech architecture stack of: Javascript, API's, and Markup. These are not new technologies but combined in the right way they can provide:

• Better Performance
• Higher Security
• Scalability

These three benefits are not insignificant. Who wouldn't want all three for their applications? Let's look at how all three are possible with Jamstack.

Better Performance

The better performance really comes down to Static Site Generation. By using a Jamstack architecture we allow ourselves to statically generate the content for our website at build time. That pre-generated content can be beamed directly to our users.

In traditional web development, we generate the page with each request. If our page is going to be the same for every user, why not generate it once and send that static content out to our users. That's how we get the big jump in performance with Jamstack.

Higher Security

I cannot tell you Jamstack solves ALL security issues. But it does a good job of simplifying security with the API layer in Jamstack. In the Jamstack architecture, we are using API's to gather data and pull in content during build time. This means secret keys, authentication, and accounts can all live on the build server and don't need to be exposed to the client at all.

Another benefit is fewer network calls. We make the call once on our build server and we have everything we need. We do not push that responsibility down to the client.

Jamstack doesn't remove all security risks, but the API driven architecture can bring on more simplicity.

Scalability

Remember those static assets I've mentioned so many times now? Well, because those assets are stored directly on a CDN without a server involved scaling up is incredibly easy. Spread your assets on a world-wide network of CDN's and you are set. No upgrading beefy servers to handle more requests, the CDN's have you covered.

So handling a few requests to a thousand requests isn't difficult for a Jamstack architected site.

With no more servers to deal with, having all our content statically generated, and using API's to populate our content we get to see those benefits of performance, security, and scalability.