Johannes Gutenberg began experimenting with the printing press in 1440, and his tinkering allowed information to be rapidly duplicated and distributed around the world. Nearly six centuries later, it’s a vastly different world, yet the idea of page distribution quickly and inexpensively remains very much the same.

In the modern context, it’s all about finding web development tools which can facilitate deployment of powerful applications and microservices to make the process of distributing content easier than ever before. JAMstack, a front-end development approach for the modern web, and its originator – Netlify Inc. – offer an innovative platform for building, testing and deploying website content.

“A platform like Netlify is all about simplification,” said Chris Bach (pictured, right), co-founder and president of Netlify. “Now you just have to maintain your content and you don’t have to worry about all of the different environments, what is up-to-date and what the infrastructure looks like. We press a button, it commits to GitHub, you get it deployed for you, and it looks the same everywhere.”

Bach spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in the latest episode of Cloud Native Insights, a series that focuses on transitions in the marketplace and how companies are making the journey to modernize and leverage cloud native technologies. He was joined by Matt Biilmann (left), co-founder and chief executive officer of Netlify, and they discussed the advantages offered by JAMstack, developer adoption of new web development tools, customer use cases, the role of serverless computing, application at the edge and democratizing distribution of online content.

Linking APIs and services

Netlify’s focus on JAMstack provides an example of how cloud native continues to carve out its own role in tech agility and innovation.

JAMstack, which stands for JavaScript, API and Markup in the cloud computing stack, was created as a way to decouple the front-end or client-side rendering of web content from the back end or server-side.

The server needs to only provide the raw web application and the browser renders it in final form. Developers gain an advantage with increased speed and flexibility.

“The advantage is if you can prebuild the front-end application layer, you can take that to HTML or application shell and distribute it across a globally distributed network,” Biilmann explained. “You can get it into the hands of the user’s browser very quickly. It’s really about getting an application into the browser using JavaScript as the runtime and talking to this whole new economy of APIs and services.”

For developers interested in removing the complexity of building deployment pipelines and running infrastructure, that’s a conversation worth having. Netlify pushes to a GitHub repository and its own microservices, and then distributes across a broad content delivery network or CDN and delivers pre-constructed websites to visitors.

There is growing evidence that developers are warming up to JAMstack as a useful tool. A recent survey conducted by Netlify of 3,000 software development professionals found that 44% of developers have been using JAMstack for a year and 37% for up to two years.

“What the JAMstack is about is saying: ‘You can get so much further as a web developer,’” Bach said. “You can take the modern build tools, GitFlows, and wrap around it the browser that has become a full-fledged operating system. You potentially have these workflows where you can get so much further and that’s Netlify’s mission.”

Nike campaign

In 2018, Nike Inc. launched a massive advertising campaign, featuring former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of its “Just Do It” motto. The digital design studio Matter Supply built a highly interactive site for the campaign, which solicited stories from 190,000 Nike users, using JAMstack and Netlify.

The website was built in a few weeks using a team of two developers. Nike recorded a $6 billion increase in share value and reported a 10% rise in income five months after the campaign launched.

“We’re seeing the potential for small distributed teams to work together and build things with a global impact in a short time,” Biilmann said. “We shouldn’t forget just how much this kind of ecosystem of readily available APIs and services around the front-end stack is allowing people to build things that years ago would have taken a big team a year to build. Suddenly, you can have a small group of programmers build something relatively impressive.”

Serverless and edge

JAMstack can leverage serverless, but not all JAMstack is serverless. The serverless community is becoming a robust ecosystem of solutions that can be connected through APIs. Netlify allows websites to be distributed and API driven.

“You have all of these different services which are your own, and other peoples’ services like Stripe or Twilio or Algolia Contentful,” Biilmann said. “When you open a pull request in GitHub with a new function, we’ll give you a URL on our globally distributed content delivery network where you can view both the whole front-end, but also sidestep all of the complexities of linking together API gateways to functions, of managing continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines. Serverless starts becoming a really important part of this JAMstack approach.”

There’s another dimension to JAMstack which is increasingly hard to ignore. Netlify incorporates edge technologies, expanding on an important evolution of cloud native as not a ‘place,’ but rather a set of distributed processes where services can be shared widely.

The company offers Netlify Dev as a product to locally test API integrations, serverless functions and edge rules. In May, the company introduced Edge Handlers in preview to provide developers with full control over server content from a variety of sources to the end user.

“Netlify is that platform that takes you from local development all the way out to edge nodes,” said Bach. “It allows you to mix and match any tool. All of those now become something that plugs into your website, rather than have to drive the website itself.”

Because Netlify’s model is framework agnostic, there is an air of democratization around the firm’s approach. A few years ago, configuring a content delivery network was largely the domain of very large tech players. Now, the act of clicking a button on Netlify will globally distribute and automatically integrate CDN configurations into GitHub, for free.

This approach goes against the grain of closed ecosystems or “walled gardens,” where website operations are tightly controlled by the ecosystem operator. Netlify wants to leverage its cloud native and JAMstack architecture to level the playing field and ensure that the web remains an important home for open, global communication.

“Walled gardens are great for absolutely no one except for the company,” Bach said. “You don’t need to use a handful of commercial platforms if you want to be heard. That’s the democratization of performance, that’s the part of the open, independent, viable web that we’re fighting for.”

Here’s the complete video interview, the latest in the continuing Cloud Native Insights series and one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE