Welcome to the Jamstack

The Jamstack has helped the Peloton site scale to millions of visitors.

A new approach to faster, more secure websites.

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All sites on Netlify are prebuilt for performance and deployed directly to our global edge network —without requiring you to manage, scale, or patch any web servers. This enables a revolutionary new architecture called the Jamstack , designed to make the web faster—and to support the new tools and workflows used in modern web development.

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The problem with the legacy web

Web server (like Apache)
Application (like WordPress)
Database (like MySQL)

Complex apps and complex servers

A traditional website is actually a program that has to run on a web server at all times.

Running sites this way needlessly slows things down, provides way too many opportunities for attack, and is expensive to scale.

What the Jamstack delivers

  1. Faster websites

    Optimize your site with prerendering and global delivery.

  2. More secure infrastructure

    By design, Jamstack architectures offer fewer points of attack.

  3. High scale without high complexity

    Prerendered frontends served at the edge are inherently scalable.

  4. Improved developer experience

    Launch faster with more productive dev & deployment cycles.

How it works

  1. Decoupling the frontend from the backend

    Unlike the large legacy apps, Jamstack projects neatly separate the frontend pages and UI from the backend apps and databases. Freed from backend servers, the frontend can then be deployed globally, directly to a CDN.

  2. Prebuilding all pages for speed

    Before deployment, the entire frontend is prebuilt into highly optimized static pages and assets. This happens in a build process (before being deployed / hosted).

  3. Dynamic content via APIs

    The global frontend uses JavaScript and APIs to talk to backend services, allowing pages to be enhanced and personalized.

How it advances the web

Running sites on web servers

replaced by

Deploying sites globally

A Jamstack deployment doesn’t run on a traditional setup of origin servers. Instead, automated deployments are used to push sites directly to the Edge / CDN.

Webpages rendered at runtime

replaced by

Webpages prerendered for speed

Rather than building content at runtime for each request, content is prebuilt and optimized during a build setup using a site generator and other build tools.

Monolithic applications

replaced by

APIs & Microservices

Decoupling the frontend from the backend allows for more modular development where we can take advantage of the huge ecosystem of third party tools to provide website functionality.

BYOT: Bring your own technologies

Prebuilding all pages for speed

The Jamstack doesn’t change the technologies you use—Jamstack sites can be built in JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python or virtually any language. It’s not a collection of specific software, it’s a set of best practices that combines:

  1. Git Workflows

    The Jamstack ties deployments closely to a Git-based workflows. Git brings the rigor and safety of version control to web projects allowing support for large projects with numerous contributors.

  2. Modern build tools

    With a build run every time a deploy happens, The Jamstack brings full support for linting code, transpiling javascript, compiling CSS, and optimizing html and assets.

  3. CDN Technology

    First deployed by large enterprises, the Jamstack democratizes the use of CDN technology to deliver web content from end points as close to users as possible.

What’s the catch?

Modern web development requires modern tools and infrastructure. Wiring this stuff together on your own can be challenging, even when using cloud services like AWS. (Some tutorials run 13-15 steps for setup alone! Really.)

And that’s exactly why we started Netlify. We’re making it possible to build and deploy production Jamstack sites in seconds.

Netlify is proud to be the first infrastructure provider native to the Jamstack and designed to support modern tools and workflows.

Tools for the Jamstack

Software / Services

Infrastructure