JAMstack is an acronym that stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup.
In short, 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 risen 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 built 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, right? Yeah, but — is it really necessary to have a server for rendering markup? That's the question the people who delivered JAMstack to the world asked 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 data source you want), and with that you could obtain a set of pre-rendered markup files that could be globally distributed using a CDN.
That's the JAMstack way.
What benefits does moving to the JAMstack model bring?
The benefits of using JAMstack are the following:
Security
You only have a bunch of files that will be served from a CDN. The attack surface is dramatically reduced because you won't have an entry point to your servers anymore. No server means no server-side vulnerabilities to exploit.
Performance
Pre-rendered markup files delivered from a CDN will always perform better than a server-side rendering solution. In SSR, the time for rendering the markup is tied to the capabilities of your web server. With JAMstack, your content is already built and sitting at the edge, ready to be served instantly.
Maintenance
No more servers to babysit — just a bunch of static files. No operating system patches, no runtime upgrades, no scaling headaches. Your deployment pipeline becomes a simple build-and-push process.
Infrastructure Costs
Maintaining a fleet of web servers is significantly more expensive than serving files from a CDN. With JAMstack, you pay for storage and bandwidth instead of compute time, which scales far more economically as traffic grows.
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 scales exceptionally well.
Unlike traditional monolithic architectures where the server handles everything from data fetching to markup rendering, JAMstack decouples these concerns. The build step handles rendering, APIs handle dynamic functionality, and the CDN handles distribution.
In the following posts, we'll explore how to build JAMstack apps using Static Site Generators and Headless CMS solutions.
