Jamstack -- what is it and how is it changing edge computing? [Q&A]

Edge computing

Some of technology's biggest changes come in the form of new abstractions. Kubernetes raised the unit of abstraction from individual servers, to clusters, and completely redefined the winners and losers in backend infrastructure.

While Jamstack might sound like a particularly messy dessert -- it's actually short for Javascript, APIs, Markup stack -- this is the latest wave of abstraction, emphasizing how frontend teams call on APIs for backend services, instead of having to configure and maintain that infrastructure directly.

Jamstack is gaining momentum with 11 million Javascript developers worldwide, and is a wave that investors want to ride. Vercel has just launched with $21 million in funding for its Jamstack cloud platform, which its lead investor Accel thinks has the opportunity to become 'the AWS of the frontend.' We spoke with Vercel CEO and founder Guillermo Rauch to learn more about the technology.

BN: How is Jamstack changing how frontend teams think about backend infrastructure?

GR: Jamstack is about pushing your frontend to the edge, rather than managing that infrastructure directly. Frontend teams should be spending their cycles on the sites and user experiences they are building -- not figuring out how to stand up infrastructure, build systems, CDN configuration and everything that goes with maintaining it.

And it's more than not having to think about servers, it's also about not having to think about writing boilerplate or configuration. In the past you'd have to set up a full stack application like LAMP, where you set up MySQL together with PHP and then you are in charge of the whole thing.

Today teams are calling on headless CMSs for content management. They’re using services like Auth0 or AWS Cognito instead of configuring their own authentication and identity. Even databases are no longer set up from scratch -- now they're in the cloud, available via API, and designed to scale automatically. It's really hard for backend infrastructure to even compete today if it's not available as-a-service.

BN: How is the move towards components improving frontend developer productivity, and where do components and Jamstack come together?

GR: For frontend teams, there's a general movement away from template systems that were common in full stack development frameworks, to component systems. React, developed at Facebook, is really the key technology and primitive of this component movement. There are other frameworks that let you define components, but the movement that pioneered the trend was React and Vercel is the team behind its Next.js web framework.

Components make it simple and succinct to share UI and behavior -- coherent experiences across every platform. Your components look the same on web, mobile and desktop. It's all universal and re-usable, and it makes frontend teams move much, much faster. Design teams love it too, since components are the building block of the new trend toward design systems, which keep companies’ style consistent across all products and web properties.

I would say that components systems and Jamstack really come together in the sense that they are both part of the overall LowCode/NoCode trend. It's easy to dismiss these as buzzwords, but the movement is real. The less code you write, the easier it is to maintain. You want less code on the frontend, with components. And you want to interact with backend services via API rather than writing boilerplate code for backend infrastructure that you have to set up and maintain.

BN: What are some of the advantages that Vercel is bringing to teams that are deploying Jamstack sites? What's different about your workflow and edge network for frontend teams?

GR: The first huge advantage of Vercel is that it transitions frontend teams from code review to deployment preview. We think that while code review is undeniably important, nothing beats teams collaborating by sharing URLs to the actual sites that are being worked on and experiencing them directly.

Vercel made a huge breakthrough with the realization that the preview deploy URL was a superior abstraction for frontend teams. We created a workflow for deploying/reviewing code in real-time -- similar to a preview in a CMS, but we accomplish this by integrating into Git and deploying with every push, which makes it work for every frontend, no matter what tech or CMS you choose. Thanks to the simplifications granted by the model, deployments are orders of magnitude faster to build, deploy and serve than when using servers or containers, which only adds to the great team-wide collaboration experience.

We operate a global network of 23 edges, and every time you make a Git push that deployment URL gets pushed out to the edge, with a lot of checkboxes taken care of that you would otherwise have to take care of yourself. We give you automatic SSL support -- every one of your deploy URLs is https. Every deploy URL is encrypted. Your sites are already optimized for all of the dials in Google’s Lighthouse scores, which increasingly have a huge influence on your SEO ranking.

What we've done with Vercel is create a cloud platform that makes frontend developers the centerpiece of this new Jamstack paradigm. We've taken our experience with React and Next.js web frameworks, our familiarity with every possible dial that Google cares about in site performance -- and created the best possible edge network, which in our view has become the device that executes the JS in Jamstack. We eliminate all the configuration and boilerplate so that frontend teams can focus on building great products and user experiences.

Image creditBeeBright/depositphotos.com

Comments are closed.

© 1998-2024 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.