What is Jamstack?

Its been around a while , though some of us are only hearing of it now. The term stands for JavaScript, APIs and Markup.

The central idea is to move as much as we can over to the front end or client , instead of the server side.The premise here is that majority of the latency that is within static sites is because of server API calls. By reducing the calls that need to be made at runtime, latency should be greatly reduced.

All the heavy lifting is done at build time. In essence the UI is compiled just as you would do code.

Benefits

Pre-rendering content at build time leads to low latency at runtime

Security vulnerability surface area is reduced since server side calls are heavily reduced.

Webpages content can be always cached on CDNs since there is none or reduced dynamic runtime data.

So for example if you were going to hit a bunch of APIs to get data from a CMS or static data store at runtime, instead at build time all this work gets done. The resulting product is then deployed and served through CDNs with readymade cacheable HTML with all your content.

Headless CMS are an important part of the JAMStack ecosystem since they can provide content at build time. The content is then assembled by Static Site generators using front end frameworks such as Next.js or Nuxt.js.

Finally hosting on a CDN backed hosting provider such as Netflify or Vercel and you are all done.

Where to start ?

Some great hands on tutorials at https://explorers.netlify.com/.

Also here are some really great articles to read further —

https://www.netlify.com/jamstack/
https://www.seancdavis.com/blog/jamstack-evolution-and-redefinition/