Insights
A Future-Proof Combination: Jamstack and Cloud-Based Tools
Discover how Jamstack and cloud-based infrastructure position your business for digital success.
- Article
- 4 MIN READ
- Dec 19, 2021
Head of Business Development LATAM
Summary
In today’s changing markets, you need a tech stack that helps you be agile and responsive to your customers' wants and needs. And in choosing your site architecture, there is a world of options to choose from. At Apply Digital, we champion building with highly flexible technologies that future-proof your business.
A combination of Jamstack and cloud-based technologies can position you to lead and be agile in a continually evolving market. We use the best cloud-based technologies to build highly customizable, experience-rich sites — a major advantage of using a decoupled approach to development. Let’s look at how these elements work together to support business agility and speed.
Peak mobile experiences with Jamstack
Optimizing for mobile experiences has been important for some time. But with the rise of eCommerce and more users connected to the internet all over the world, having responsive tech will make or break your brand experience.
In Colombia, according to the Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies, 2,638 free internet zones were set up in urban and rural public spaces in 2021 alone. With continuous growth in mobile phone usage, available connection points do not always match the speed of network requirements. This makes it even more important to have highly responsive tech to meet the growing demands for mobile.
There is a solution that can help support this demand. Jamstack is a headless web development methodology with an API-first approach. All integrations communicate via API calls, which simplifies interactions between front-end and back-end systems, as it is a highly compatible protocol. On the client-side, content hosted in HTML entries is distributed via a CDN (Content Delivery Network), using something like Contentful’s Content Delivery API.
This setup enables two things worth noting in the way content moves through the system:
First, content flows through a network of nodes where there is proximity to deliver the content to the user. In this way, the closest node delivers the requested content and reduces latency. For example, in Colombia, there could be up to fifteen nodes distributed between Bogotá, Medellín, and Barranquilla.
Second, if a node goes down, the content will still be hosted in the CDN cache so it will still be delivered. Simply put, it provides speed and performance anytime, anywhere.
Tech that supports you at any scale
If you don’t yet work with dynamic content using an approach like Jamstack, you may have already experienced a few of the challenges that come with being bound to more rigid architecture.
Traditional platforms are not great at adapting with you as your business needs change. The site architecture is often:
Limiting
Can be incompatible with new technologies
Experiences downtime
Requires a lot of time and expertise to maintain
With Jamstack on the other hand, you are able to create any functionality and user experience you desire. Being cloud-based, your site modules and resources are elastic, so they will automatically respond to any increases in site traffic or usage.
The on-demand nature of the setup helps companies manage costs while having the peace of mind that operations will not be affected. Because Jamstack is a headless methodology, any front-end optimization doesn’t condition or overload the back-end, since each service uses its own computing resources and servers. So if you're looking to scale regionally or even globally, you can add new components without interrupting service.
Accelerate project launches and enhance experiences
In events where you need to launch, pivot, or grow quickly, using Jamstack and cloud-based technology provides great flexibility.
Developer and UX teams need time to create optimal experiences for your users. But sometimes you don’t have a ton of time, or you need to speed up your process. Since Jamstack uses a cloud-enabled setup based on third-party integrations, you won't need to spend effort on server maintenance, updates, and patches — each provider takes care of their own performance. Plus, your content teams will be empowered to publish new posts without needing to write a line of code. Overall, your team can focus entirely on their specific areas, and create the digital experience you're looking to deliver.
At Apply Digital, we often use Jamstack architecture to support client builds. We believe these principles for future-proofing technologies empower brands and position them to adapt to the future. If you would like help implementing changes to your platform, reach out to someone on our team and we’d love to discuss how we can help.
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