[bobfunk]

Netlify CEO and coiner of terms here :)

I would actually argue that Jamstack has won to the point of basically just being "Modern Web Development" by now.

In the 7 years since I first presented the term at Smashing Conference in San Francisco, I can't think of a single new successful commercial CMS that hasn't been headless or API first. I can't think of a single new successful commerce platform that's launched in that period, that hasn't been headless or API driven.

On the contrary, big existing players have mostly changed their strategy. Shopify is more and more embracing a decoupled approach of building globally distributed shop UI's with Remix (running either on their own platform or places like Netlify or Cloudflare) pulling in products, pricing and check out flows from their API layer. Most existing CMS companies have started integrating API first approaches into their strategy and in the data space we've seen an explosion of "Database as API" from Neon, to Supabase, to Xata or Converx, etc...

Part of the confusion has always been the conflation of Jamstack with "static" when even my first presentation on Jamstack back in 2016 had a big slide with the word static crossed out to underline that I personally didn't intend to conflate the two. The real game changer for treating the web UI as it's own decoupled application, and the backend as a set of API and services where some are your own running your core business logic, but a lot of them are provided by external providers.

At Netlify we're now focusing less on evangelizing the Jamstack approach of treating the web UI as it's own decoupled, independent layer, running on top of API's rather than stuffed into your backend systems - and more on helping really large companies adopt this at scale for their core web architectures (Composable Architectures). But not because we're any less bullish on the first part, on the contrary - because we don't really have to anymore!

And the article's conclusion that we somehow failed is absurd. Sites and apps on Netlify are visited by more than a billion unique visitors a month, we delivered more than 10 Petabyte of data out of our network in December alone, have onboarded more than 4 million developers to our platform, and continue to prove that we can scale this architecture to some of the largest and most complex companies in the world, running big complex projects with faster time to market, higher productivity and higher conversions and revenue.

[shiftpgdn]

JAMStack isn't modern web development. 80% of the internet still runs on PHP on traditional servers. Netlify is needless complexity (nevermind the vendor lock-in) 99% of developers will never need.

You also don't address the OP's points where Netlify has suffered the same fate of "enshitification" where features slowly get stripped out and moved into pay to use buckets, likely at the behest of needing to payback 100+ million dollars in VC funding.

[blitz_skull]

Your comment doesn’t refute the idea that JAMStack isn’t modern web development. All you did was pull up the over-used statistic of “80% of the web is PHP” which I’ve heard for well over a decade. It may have been true at one point, but I highly doubt it is now. (Citation needed)

Netlify has done nothing but innovate and push the needle forward for front-end devs. I’ll be there until there’s a VERY strong reason not to be.

[shiftpgdn]

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php 77.4% as of today.

[notatoad]

>of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.

i'd be curious to know what portion of websites they scan they know this for.

[cies]

PHP is know for being very leaky about being PHP (and since PHP + ecosystem have a bad history of CVEs, being leaky about being PHP is not cool).

Java/Kotlin/Go/Rust/Ruby/Python/JS/TS are a lot less leaky about what language the server-side is written in. Usually the webserver used advertises itself name and in a server string, but it is considered bad practice and thus often switched off.

Reading "php" extensions in paths is a clear giveaway, so are "htm" extensions for microsoft products. Tools usually guess the language/framework based on some of these giveaways and the better the tools the less this is evident.

I jut checked some web apps I worked on, and only the one I last touched 10+ years ago is detected with buildwith.com; it's a Rails site.

All the Java/Kotlin/Rust/Hasura+Elm apps I worked on since are now shown as "Nginx" (the rev proxy in front of it).

[TylerE]

I just checked the day gig site... builtwith claims it's using Webflow and Apollo GraphQL (Neither of which it is) and doesn't mention at all the language it's actually implemented in (Python), although that's not surprising since it's an in house framework.

[tacker2000]

How is being “leaky” in any way bad or even good?

Every programming language has holes, its just that with PHP the attack surface is much larger, so i guess people find more holes, etc..

Are you advocating “security by obscurity”?

[bdcravens]

If people are picking up non-JAMstack solutions for greenfield web development, then that means JAMstack is just one of many options for "modern web development". (Along with Laravel, Rails, Django, and even/especially Wordpress, depending on how we gatekeep what we mean by "web development")

[bobfunk]

Objectively speaking our free tier today have far more features, higher limits and more capabilities than it's ever had before.

We are also building a real, longterm sustainable enterprise business. We're not a non-profit and we're here to create a big lasting company that can keep investing into the future of the web.

[shiftpgdn]

https://www.netlify.com/pricing/#pricing-table-full-feature-...

Almost every feature you charge for is something you can achieve for free inside of a basic VPS. I understand you have the classic SV "Hotel California" model where you can check in but you can never leave. But frankly this makes the internet worse in every way possible and part of the point of the original article.

[doctor_eval]

I gotta say, this comment really comes across as being written by someone who has quite literally never tried Netlify, or doesn’t understand the value prop at all.

Seriously, it is orders of magnitude faster to deploy a static website on Netlify - simply drag and drop a folder from desktop - than it is to spin up just a single VPS on Vultr… and by the time you’ve configured that VPS, I could have done a dozen revisions to the website, and it would still be more difficult to deploy updates to the VPS than to Vultr. Don’t even get me started on the complexity of a global CDN.

Do I wish all of Netlify was free? Sure, yes I do. Does this mean it’s not valuable? Of course not.

The irony of this is that you seem to be saying that (a) Netlify locks the customer in with useless features, and (b) it can be trivially reimplemented in an entirely custom but otherwise “free” VPS.

The real question is, which “free” VPS are you going to use that will serve the same capacity as Netlify’s paid plans? AWS? Do you think you can avoid lock-in using AWS - of all things?!

[shiftpgdn]

Oracle's free ARM VM offering can easily serve the same degree (actually significantly more) than a Netlify deployment.

[doctor_eval]

You’re really going to have to provide some figures to substantiate this. Bandwidth, volume and global TTFB would be a good start.

Also, by your own standards this is a comparison between a paid Netlify account and a free VM. Right?

[prng2021]

You know you have to secure, patch, and monitor a VPS right? Why pay for a VPS at all? You can get more compute, memory, and storage with a dedicated server for the same price and even setup multiple VMs on that server, each with all the features of a VPS “for free”.

[shiftpgdn]

I un-ironically agree.

[klysm]

Then go ahead and use a VPS…

[shiftpgdn]

The difference is I'm not out touting using a VPS as "The next generation of web development" and having payola articles written that if you don't use a VPS then your career is going to get left behind.

[cpursley]

Setting up a VPS - yeah, sooooo easy.

I struggle with even Digital Ocean and just want my site to freaking run.

Downvote me all you want, but I'd rather ship features than fuddle with infrastructure.

[ovao]

Setting up a VPS is pretty easy. Ensuring your VPS is configured to restart your app when the server restarts, maintaining OS and library updates, maintaining security, updating the app itself with simple-enough conventions, and configuring monitoring is not so necessarily easy. That’s not including documenting (even if only for your own future reference) how things are configured.

Digital Ocean in particular has great guides to get you from the starting line to something that in most cases will work okay, but as a long-term solution to “I have an app I want to run on some infrastructure”, I agree that there’s a non-zero cost to managing a server that, like you, I’d much rather not deal with.

[bdcravens]

And Dropbox is little more than rsync, but that doesn't mean that it's not valuable for someone, even if it's not you.

[cpursley]

> vendor lock-in

How is it vendor lock-in when I can easily move my JS app to Render.com, AWS s3, Cloudflare, etc?

[gochi]

>80% of the internet still runs on PHP on traditional servers.

Do they? Or do they just use Wordpress? This is important to differentiate because people's idea of PHP on traditional servers ITT is a far cry from setting up wordpress.

[Justsignedup]

Netlify worked for me when all we did was basic static hosting for about $500 a year. Then they wanted to up us to about 10k a year and suddenly the cost was significantly worse. The only reason we didn't dump it is because we didn't have enough engineers to swap it to something else because we had projects that needed to be done, but it was our top optional priority.

Unfortunately netlify went from loved to hated overnight.

[httpsterio]

what vendor lock in? Netlify at its core is still quite simple: pull stuff in from GitHub/Lab, run the build commands in an Ubuntu VM and publish the results.

Sure, there are some plugins that you can use to transmute the result builds and there's Edge functions, but nothing is hard to move to another provider.

[cutler]

> I would actually argue that Jamstack has won to the point of basically just being "Modern Web Development" by now.

Don't you think there might be just a little bit of hubris creeping in here? JAMSTACK is such a niche/fringe it's not worth talking about. I'm a solo dev and network with many others. I don't think I've ever heard JAMSTACK mentioned let alone adopted. You're living in a self-generated bubble.

[no_butterscotch]

I agree with you.

I've been in web dev for the past 10 years and none of the companies I've worked at in San Fran use this tech.

I'm familiar with the space: Gatsby, GraphQL, etc. I took a Jamstack course on frontendmasters, but I chose to skip using it for personal projects.

[irrational]

I've been doing web development since 1997, but posts like these let me know how far out of the loop I have become. I have no idea what Jamstack, Netlify, Headless CMS, etc. even are. I'm still in the: here is a webpage (html, css, js) that makes an ajax/fetch call to a webservice that SQL queries a Postgres database and returns the results as a JSON string.

[pharmokiss]

That's all they're doing, too. They're just hiding it behind a paywall and a bunch of needless abstraction.

[te_chris]

Honestly, I've just finished 5 years as CTO with an e-com company with our CMS built on Elixir and I can't tell you how wrong you are. Jamstack, headless CMS and SPA frontends etc are just a massive waste of time. There's no joy in having separate code for your API and frontend.

Our pages rendered in 20ms.

[paradox460]

I worked at an ecom that used Elixir instead of an spa, with the backend being the older legacy app, and elixir rendering pages based off API data from the backend. This was well before live view

It worked amazingly fast. Some things were painful, and would have been better served with some progressive enhancement via a dollop of frontend js, but they were rather small exceptions

When I left a few years back they'd undergone some leadership turnover and the new wanted to migrate to some messy jamstack thing. They had millions of SKUs. Last I heard they migration hadn't gone anywhere

[te_chris]

Tale as old as time lol. Elixir is uniquely great at content sites due to the fast template rendering - but it’s really not about Ex at all. Just don’t drown in unnecessary moving parts and build tools. It’s just a website.

[cpursley]

LiveView wasn’t ready yet when I started our startup (react on front, Elixir and Hasura on back).

But man, I wish it had been. React is nice enough but the idea of not having to redefine my types at several different layers and fight with npm sounds like a dream.

[te_chris]

We were in a similar position. CMS ran on dead views with a bit of progressive enhancement first, and then we had a couple of react apps around for interactive parts. When liveview was released we tried it out and it basically “just worked” as much as a software lib can, so set about getting rid of the react.

[perelin]

honest question: sounds like a cool architecture! care to give some insights how you achieve this?

[te_chris]

Sure: key idea is pages are documents. Each page contains a JSON blob which specifies the blocks it's made up of and the content for each block. Each block is just a module with a schema specifying the data it takes and an associated template and a render function. Rendering a page is a URL resolution -> Controller -> DB lookup for the page -> pass the block list to a master render function and done.

The thing some people don't realise is EEx is compiled to a function call, which means no string interpolation, regex whatever. Getting a bunch of HTML is just a function call.

[boredumb]

Jamstack is "Modern Web Development"? Are we back to that point in the webdev rollercoaster where everyone pretends like embedding business logic in a client using javascript is a good idea?

[gardenhedge]

Where else are you going to put it?

[xnx]

On the server

[jmuguy]

The author never actually articulated what his beef was with Netlify. So yeah I think you're just as confused as the rest of us. Apparently Netlify was supposed to become Heroku, but Heroku is bad, but Render (which is... Heroku with a fresh coat of paint) isn't? I dunno.

[cpursley]

Render is (a cheaper) Heroku + Netlify ;)

[giovannibonetti]

Render seems to have autoscaling with a reasonable round-robin load balancer [1], whereas Heroku only has autoscaling in (expensive) Private Spaces [2] with a dumb load balancer [3].

[1] https://feedback.render.com/features/p/docs-on-how-renders-l... [2] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/scaling#autoscaling [3] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-routing#request-d...

[cpursley]

And Render also handles distribution Elixir which is impossible on Heroku and a pain to roll yourself. Plus, they have free static/SPAs.

[blitz_skull]

Yo. Thanks for Netlify. It’s legit and I, for one, welcome our new overlords.

All jesting aside it’s easily one of the most pleasant developer experiences you can have as a modern web dev in 2023. Everything just works and failures are loud, obvious, and usually dead simple to fix.

Well done, says I.

[paultopia]

FWIW, I love you, Netlify CEO. I've got a bunch of different static-ish websites hosted with you---my personal site, the sites for three different books, etc., etc. Everything is build using the CI, with a different frameworks and/or build processes (essentially whatever I felt like playing with at the time), and it makes it incredibly easy and cheap. So don't listen to the haters.

[figassis]

I don’t really understand the concept of Jamstack or why it’s new. Isn’t it just HTML+JS (whether built with a framework such as Angular, React, Svelte, Gatsby, etc) that uses a backend api? What exactly are we discovering? What is the innovation here? Markdown?

[Takennickname]

Lol. Masterclass in how to lose good will: claim that 80% of developers are outdated.