The New Stack Podcast

Episode 127: Serverless Web Content Delivery with JAMstack

Episode Summary

There is a new architecture for front-end web development: JAMStack rethinks the current server-browser architecture, freeing the developer from worrying about fiddling with Apache, Linux or other aspects of backend support. For this week’s episode of the 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. 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.

Episode Notes

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

For this week’s episode of the 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.
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.