The New Stack Context: Serverless Web Content Delivery with JAMstack

There is a new architecture for frontend web development: JAMStack rethinks the current server-browser architecture, freeing the developer from fiddling with Apache, Linux or other aspects of backend support.

For this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, which offers a JAMstack-based service that allows developers to simply push their code to git in order to update their web site or application. Key to this platform is an open source user interface framework created by Rauch, called Next.js, based on Facebook’s React, but tweaked to make it easier to build user interfaces not only for the developer but even for the designer.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Episode 127: Serverless Web Content Delivery with JAMstack

On the benefit of using a managed JAMstack such as Vercel’s (over a traditional LAMP stack), Rauch noted that:

You can deploy to an essentially serverless infrastructure, right? I always tell people that content delivery networks were the OG serverless — because they never required management. They were perfectly delegated. It’s a globally distributed system with no single point of failure. You’re not going to have to worry about Linux and Apache because you can deploy to any distributed global network that can serve essentially markup, JavaScript, CSS and static files. Then obviously to power the API, server rendering and more advanced functionality, the Vercel network gives you serverless functions. So we try to complete the entire JAMstack equation.

In our interview, we also discussed:

• The motivation for writing Next.js.
• How JAMStack differs from the typical server-browser model.
• The developer experience for Vercel.
• The importance of running a content delivery network for Vercel.
• The developer experience for cloud platforms.

Later in the show, we reviewed some of the top TNS stories and posts of the week, including:

• This Week in Programming: Linux Kernel Keepers Mull In-Tree Support for Rust
• How AI Observability Cuts Down on Kubernetes Complexity
• Bridgecrew: All These Misconfigured Terraform Modules Are a Security Issue 

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