Glossary
JAMstack
JAMstack is an architecture pattern for building websites using JavaScript, APIs, and pre-rendered Markup — serving from a CDN with no traditional web server in the request path.
JAMstack stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. The pattern: pre-render the HTML at build time (or on-demand at the edge), serve from a CDN, and call APIs (your own or third-party) for any dynamic data the page needs. The acronym is older than the architecture — Mathias Biilmann coined it around 2015, and the pattern matured through 2020–2024.
JAMstack sites typically combine: a static site generator (Next.js, Astro, SvelteKit, Hugo), a headless CMS for content (Contentful, Sanity, Strapi, MDX in the repo), serverless functions for dynamic logic (Vercel Functions, Netlify Functions, Cloudflare Workers), and third-party APIs for everything else (Stripe for payments, Algolia for search, Auth0 for authentication).
The benefits: speed (static HTML from a CDN is fast everywhere), reliability (no server to fail, no database to maintain), security (no PHP runtime, no MySQL admin panel, no plugin supply chain), and developer experience (Git-based workflow, immutable deploys, branch previews). Cost is often 10–100x lower than traditional LAMP/WordPress hosting for marketing-site-scale traffic.
The trade-offs: any genuinely dynamic content (user dashboards, personalized recommendations) still needs server logic; full-app workflows (multi-step transactions, real-time collaboration) push back toward traditional server architectures; SEO for paginated / search-result-style URLs requires careful ISR or SSR fallback strategies.
In 2026, the JAMstack label has lost some currency — the architecture won, so it stopped being called 'JAMstack' and started being called just 'modern web'. The same patterns dominate: Next.js + Vercel, Astro + Netlify, SvelteKit + Cloudflare Pages. The name fades; the architecture stays.
Example
A typical JAMstack site: a Next.js codebase in GitHub generates static HTML on every push, deploys to Vercel's edge CDN, fetches blog content from Contentful at build time, processes contact-form submissions via a Vercel serverless function, and uses Stripe Checkout for payments — no traditional web server in the request path.