Jamstack

Jamstack is an approach to building and delivering websites that focuses on separating the presentation layer—what the user sees—from business logic and data management. It differs from other web architectures with a decoupled frontend in the way data is getting delivered to the page. Jamstack websites pre-render pages by fetching most of the data on build time. This makes the pages lighter and less reliant on client-side JavaScript.

The Jamstack approach is a good fit for websites where a lot of content is universal for all users, for example, blogs, news sites, and knowledge bases. You can couple it with a web application to fetch and interact with personalized and highly dynamic data on the client side. It works well in combination with SaaS solutions that cover aspects of the backend logic you need—such as eCommerce, search, or comments. There are also specialized cloud platforms that provide tools to build, deploy, and serve Jamstack sites.

Building and maintaining a self-hosted Jamstack setup is also possible, but the Jamstack ecosystem leans heavily in favor of cloud solutions. Another consideration is build time. While a typical Jamstack website is incredibly stable on runtime, rebuilding all pages frequently may become an issue as the project grows. Finally, there are very few hosting options tailored to Jamstack, thus causing a substantial degree of vendor lock-in.

If you want to learn more, take a look at our blog post on this topic.