Welcome to the JAMstack Era (Part 2)

Here's part 2 of our series on the JAMstack for the enterprise. You can find the original article on the WebriQ website HERE

What is the difference between a CDN and an ADN?

In order to bring many of the superpower benefits to the JAMstack, Netlify has created an Application Delivery Network, Netlify Edge, that has the capabilities necessary to deliver globally distributed web web applications and products, going beyond a traditional Content Delivery Network.

This infrastructure, trusted by Citrix, Verizon, Peloton, Atlassian, Samsung, and other leading enterprises, works with multi-cloud providers. It evolves the current thinking of edge services and delivery technologies to provide the following additional functionality:

• Support for static sites: Like a CDN, an ADN enables the management of static sites of pre-rendered content.
• Works without an origin: In an ADN, pages are pre-rendered and site on edge servers to facilitate instant accessibility, without needing to be built from a database as the customer opens their browser.
• Offers instant cache validation: an ADN can eliminate the risk of delivering stale or superseded content and functionalities.
• Can prerender and run builds: Not only is all content prerendered for a static site, but builds can be deployed continuously so that as new features or content is updated in Git, new versions of the product are pushed live to the edge.
• Features Git-integrated CI/CD: This build capability is integrated with the ADN so that as new features are added the build workflow is streamlined. This enables automatic deploys and rollbacks and facilitates Infrastructure-as-Code models for creating and delivering web-hosted enterprise applications.
• Has Application Performance Monitoring: Because of these functionalities, an ADN takes on the tasks of performance analytics and actions. APM becomes a service offered by the cloud management provider.

The Preferred and Recommended JAMstack toolchain of WebriQ GLUE

With the JAMstack, your Enterprise Gets Superpowers

In recent years, IT reorientation started with a realization that in mobile and digital environments, legacy systems with monolithic codebases need to be broken down into component pieces (microservices). With microservices, APIs connect services into new compositions and more easily allow the introduction of new features without risking major downtime to deploy code and upgrade systems.

The evolutionary timeline to the JAMstack

• Monolithic systems: All of the business operations in a single, monolithic codebase became brittle as new feature additions risked breaking older code, and required production systems had to come offline while being updated.
• Microservices: A reorientation of monolithic systems into a series of components connected via API so that each component could be upgraded without the whole codebase falling over or all operations needing to be taken offline during upgrades.
• LAMP stack: Linux, Apache HTTP server, MySQL databases, and PHP programming used to manage customer-facing digital engagement through websites and enterprise web applications. Often delivered through a CMS provider like WordPress which builds and loads an initial HTML page from the server when required by the customer. During this shift, LAMP stacks became common toolchains within IT departments. The LAMP stack relied on Linux, the Apache HTTP server, MySQL databases, and the PHP programming language. Enterprises would rely on a content management system (CMS) and plugins built on the LAMP stack to manage their web content, which (contradictory to the move to microservices) meant introducing and relying on another monolith.
• MEAN stack: MongoDB (or other NoSQL) database, Express, Angular, and Node JavaScript frameworks. The MEAN stack leverages JavaScript to communicate between the frontend and backend. JavaScript frameworks allow sites to be more dynamic and include functionality in the frontend so that as customers engage with site content, delivery can be more responsive. Some webpage content can respond to inputs without requesting the backend server to reload pages.
• JAMstack: Javascript, APIs, and Markup allow delivery speed to be enhanced, as the content is pre-rendered during the build process and deployed to edge networks so that it is instantly accessible to customer demand, rather than being built from the server each time.

CMS and LAMP Stack Deficiencies

There is no doubt that with the move to CMS and LAMP stacks, enterprises have learned new digital skills and been able to more rapidly create web products and apps for customer consumption, as well as create new web-based internal systems that act as enterprise apps in the browser.

But the complexities are now outweighing the advantages, and this is impacting revenue:

• Slow load time for web content displayed in the browser and on mobile is driving away potential customers and slowing down internal efficiencies.
• Business logic introduced on the client-side is causing breaking changes that mean revenue-generating elements of the business logic are not functioning correctly after a new feature is added.
• Costs are increasing for IT as developer teams are needing to focus resources to manage the scaling of apps and server loads and website uptimes.
• Top talent ends up looking for opportunities at other businesses where they can concentrate on building products

The constraints you have to deal with now on the LAMP stack.

• Initial page loads from the server still require rendering while the customer waits. Slow page loads drive customers away, with 53% of website visitors moving on if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, while 79% of those who do stick around are reluctant to use and buy from the site in the future.
• Tightly coupled frontend and backend: Frontend developers love their work because they love building things. The more they are required to monitor and manage the performance of servers, the less actual building they get to do, and the less satisfied they are as members of your product teams.
• Lack of version control: CMS and LAMP stack architectures have more difficulty managing versioning. This often results in multiple versions of work being pushed to staging environments by developers who need to sign off from multiple stakeholders. Frontend developer talent can be frustrated and overrun by draft edits as stakeholders each weigh in on different versions of staged content, and the need for developers to respond to multiple staging feedback can slow down the ability to push new changes to production.
• Increased repetitive work: Many enterprises have many teams working on very similar development projects. Successful approaches learned from deploying one product need to be rebuilt repeatedly in each new product, often manually. Since each web product ends up being a bespoke build, this reaffirms an organizational architectural culture where teams can choose their own toolchain, resulting in individual teams choosing different JavaScript frameworks based on their own preferences.

One of the challenges of the JAMStack is that the stack is not monolithic, so there are many various frameworks, Static Site generators, publishing platforms, APIs, and automation to choose from. It kind of needs to be glued together with some initial choices to be made at the start of each project.

WebriQ has made these fundamental choices for you:

• A GIT based workflow
• React-based Static Site Generator (GatsbyJS)
• A headless CMS approach with Sanity
• Micro and serverless services for Forms and other interactive applications
• Most common APIs available from services like Algolia, Stripe etc.
• Netlify for builds and publishing websites and web application

All our expertise has been bundled into a React-based WEB APPLICATION. Through the WebriQ APP, you can: Provision any JAMStack website

• Change code on any JAMStack website through a GIT workflow
• Content manage and update any JAMStack website
• Publish any JAMStack website through Netlify
• ADD serverless Forms to any JAMStack website
• ADD an SSL certificate to any JAMStack website
• ADD collaborators (like editors or developers) to any JAMStack website
• Redirect your JAMStack to multiple Top Level Domains
• Track your web visitors through integrated WebriQ analytics

The WebriQ JAMstack Application

WebriQ has been building Jamstack websites for almost four years and is considered as one of the pioneers in using the JAMStack in commercial deployments. With over 250 projects under our belt, we are an experienced team of developers solely focused on JAMStack websites, web applications and progressive web applications (PWA).

Read more in part 3 about how and why making the move with WebriQ may be the right choice for you.