Why we built a Jamstack site

How we built a website in a week...off the side of our desk

Ryan Coleman

Last month, inspired by JamstackConf I built Jamstackery.website. This mini-site runs on AWS, and is managed by our platform.

Our hope is that this mini-site demonstrates the promise of an architecture that blends containers with functions, and all the supporting certificates, permissions, and resources necessary to provide a world-class infrastructure.

The content management system is a headless Ghost CMS, running on an Aurora Serverless MySQL cluster, ECS Fargate containers, and more which you can interact with in this Stackery designer widget.

Gatsby starter with Ghost

Ghost is such a great CMS experience for blogs but we took the experience even further. You're interacting with a Gatsby-built front-end which runs in AWS CloudFront. It's wicked fast and just as cheap. When you're not publishing, the expensive infrastructure powering the CMS can be paused.

This architecture blends the best of both worlds- long-lived services that provide rich experiences for content teams and fast, reliable edge-driven applications for the application user.

The entire architecture is 💯 serverless and can be built around a continuous delivery pipeline to enable published Ghost posts to automatically build out through Gatsby to the CDN.

Why? Flexibility and enterprise-grade infrastructure. AWS managed services are world-class and there are solid options for every imaginable use case. If your needs are more custom than the off-the-shelf SaaS or you need to own the data and infrastructure your application runs on, but you don't want to wield a broad server footprint, AWS serverless is worth a look.

Remember, serverless isn't only functions. It's an approach to consuming managed services for needs that aren't special to your business, helping your developers, operations staff, and InfoSec professionals focus on the core application while relying on other specialists to provide the application infrastructure you need.

You can try deploying your own Ghost & Gatsby Jamstack via this tutorial in Stackery's documentation.

jamstack

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