Application development has changed radically in the cloud native era; and not just with the rise of containers and Kubernetes for large-scale deployments. Web development is also undergoing a sea change, with the emergence of JAMstack as a significant trend.
Just as Docker was the original change agent for the containers revolution, a single company was behind the JAMstack movement: Netlify. So I reached out to Netlify’s co-founder and CEO Matt Biilmann, to talk about Netlify’s journey so far and its current place in the developer ecosystem.
The “jam” in JAMstack refers to JavaScript, APIs and Markup; the “stack” part refers to cloud computing technologies. But it’s not so much the components of JAMstack that make it interesting. It’s that the approach decouples the frontend of web development from its backend. Ultimately this makes life less complex for the developer (although not so much for the content creator, an issue I’ll address later in the article).
But for the developer, JAMstack has many potential benefits. As Biilmann explained, “we take all of the complexity of building the deployment pipelines, of running the infrastructure, of managing serverless functions, of all of that, [and] we simply abstract that away from you.”
Note that JAMstack is great for end users too, because it moves all the dynamic programming from the server to the user’s browser. This means faster, easier to scale, and more secure websites and apps.
Netlify Is Technology Agnostic
As a baseline for developers, Netlify automates the build and deployment process. No more messing about with web servers; all you need is a frontend tool and a git repository. Using my own experimental JAMstack blog as an example: when I create a new post (in my case, using a Static Site Generator called Hugo), I build it on my local file system, “commit” the changes to GitHub, and then Netlify automatically deploys the updated site to its custom content delivery network (CDN).
All I had to do when I first set up my site was connect Netlify to GitHub, and tweak the settings so that Netlify knows I use the Hugo framework.
Which brings me to the next interesting point about Netlify: it is framework agnostic. Hugo is based on the Go programming language, but I could’ve used the Javascript-based Gatsby as my Static Site Generator — or any other frontend tool.
This technology agnosticism was by design, Biilmann told me.
“The core idea is that everything starts with the frontend developer working with the frameworks they are adopting and using, and as long as they stick to this JAMstack architecture, we can take the whole workflow — from once you write the code, till you get it in front of users.”
“We always thought about this broadly from the web architecture perspective,” he continued, “and we always saw the area of the specific frameworks and the technologies there, as an area that rotates very quickly — tools come and go.”
Netlify can work with many frontend frameworks, including Hugo, Gatsby, Vue.js, Next.js, Angular, Ember.js and Nuxt. Most of these are JavaScript frameworks — Gatsby, for example, is based on the popular open source JavaScript library, React.
“We want to embrace all of those frameworks,” said Biilmann.
It would’ve been easier to pick just one framework and promote its JAMstack approach that way, but as Biilmann explains, Netlify chose to focus on “how do we look at the whole architecture of the web in the future, and build the right primitives and the right components that framework authors can then adopt and build on, and use to push the web forward.”
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