Jamstack

An architectural approach to web development built on pre-rendered markup served from a CDN, with dynamic needs handled by JavaScript and reusable APIs at the edge/client rather than a monolithic server. The name originally stood for JavaScript, APIs, Markup; the term was coined by netlify, whose git→build→CDN deploy model is the canonical substrate.

Core idea

The defining move is decoupling build from serve. Pages are compiled ahead of time by a static-site-generator, deployed as immutable static assets to a CDN, and served directly — no application server assembling HTML per request from a database. Anything genuinely dynamic (search, auth, commerce, personalization) is layered back in at the edge or client through APIs and serverless functions, so the dynamic surface is small and explicit rather than the default path for every page.

Claimed benefits, per jamstack-generators-list: performance (static assets served from the edge), security (no public request-time database or admin surface to attack), and deployment simplicity (ship files, not a running stack).

Relationship to the rest of the wiki

• A static-site-generator is the build-time engine of a Jamstack site; astro (with islands-architecture) and eleventy are Jamstack-aligned generators, and jamstack.org curates the ranked jamstack-generators-list.
• A headless-cms supplies the content the generator pulls at build time — the content-management half that keeps an editor experience without a request-time database.
• netlify is the deploy/CDN substrate (and the term’s origin); within the static-site-publishing umbrella, Jamstack is the architecture layer (generator → architecture → CDN delivery).
• It is the structural alternative to the request-time CMS model of wordpress, whose wordpress-market-share-decline is the market backdrop here.

Boundary note

As the popular generators (jamstack-generators-list‘s top entries) became React meta-frameworks that also do server rendering, the strict “pre-rendered + APIs” definition has blurred toward general edge-rendered web architecture — the same category-boundary question static-site-generator and the synthesis track.

Related

static-site-generator · static-site-publishing · islands-architecture · headless-cms · netlify · astro · wordpress · synthesis