The Jamstack architecture is a perfect fit for enterprise-level websites. Whether your online application serves hundreds or millions, the philosophies governing this simplistic approach to deploying web applications can reduce costs, increase security, and build into developer satisfaction — all while positioning your organization for massive scale.
The Jamstack is a modern web architecture designed to make online applications faster, more secure, and easier to scale. It takes the best principles of DevOps with modern front-end technologies and gives your developers a risk-free, continuously deployed solution that empowers your entire product team to run rather than walk.
For us, this meant more maintainable codebases for our developers, increased speed and scale for our clients, and improved job satisfaction for our employees.
This may sound revolutionary, but the core principle here is a resurfacing of logic from the past. You may have heard the terms “service-oriented architecture” or “microservices.” This pattern of decoupling complex systems makes a ton of sense, particularly for smaller development teams with iterative release cycles. Microservices have been gaining rapid enterprise adoption in the last few years.
“A microservice architecture – a variant of the service-oriented architecture structural style – arranges an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. In a microservices architecture, services are fine-grained and the protocols are lightweight.” - Wikipedia
In a 2021 survey, IBM concluded that 87 percent of IT leaders in mid- and large-market companies view the costs associated with microservice adoption as “worth the effort and expense.” And 78 percent of those surveyed say they plan to increase their investment in this architectural design pattern in the future.
Well, the key benefits for this type of architecture include: isolation of business concerns, increased scale, and increased productivity for product teams thanks to a more flexible and evolvable suite of services. Customers report better experiences and IT leaders roundly report successful outcomes.
Reducing dependency between related parts of any system makes the product more resilient. When one part fails, it does not disrupt the entire operation. The system is more maintainable since developers can iterate on that one part of the system in isolation. This pattern of decoupling dependent services has enjoyed widespread adoption when applied to databases, APIs and 3rd party services. But the benefits of employing this strategy on your website’s front-end are only now coming into focus.
The Jamstack is microservice architecture for your corporate website. One dedicated service builds your static assets while another deploys them to the cloud. The CDN (Content Delivery Network) frees your devs from worrying about infrastructure or delivery. Security concerns are significantly reduced. By isolating components of your tech stack that are vulnerable or susceptible to failure, you are insulating the organization from future risk.
A frequent misconception about the Jamstack is that it's only for “static” or pre-rendered content. While this is indeed one area where the Jamstack shines, it is by no means limited to read-only interactions.
Thanks to cloud-based serverless computing, companies like Cloudflare, Netlify and Vercel are in a veritable arms race over who can deliver the most comprehensive suite of dynamic services to complement their hosting solutions.
The result is dynamic, server-side microservice APIs that live right alongside the front-end code that consumes it. That means we can deliver more personalized content experiences and highly dynamic user interfaces at scale, without the burden of operations or systems management. The consumption-based pricing of serverless computing also ensures that companies only pay for the precise resources needed to complete the workload.
Meanwhile, popular front-end frameworks like NextJS & Gatsby continue to evolve toward a hybrid model blending the best of static generation and SPA-style architecture. That means more flexible and more maintainable solutions that can be dynamic or static depending on the needs of your developers.
The Jamstack philosophy is a perfect candidate for enterprise adoption. The same principles and opportunity that gave rise to microservices in the back office can now be deployed in the front office with ease.
As a philosophy that embraces industry standard solutions to reduce risk, the Jamstack is nothing new. It simply brings the same benefits of decoupled, service-oriented architecture to the front end of your website. It’s about delivering tangible value through increased security, near-infinite scale, and reduced costs.
Need help reducing your company’s risk? Contact Ample to learn more about how we can apply this same strategy to your business.
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