The trend that started as backend as a service for native mobile apps many years ago is now becoming popular with web applications. We're seeing frameworks such as Gatsby.js that combine static site generation and client-side rendering with third-party APIs. Referred to as JAMstack (the JAM stands for JavaScript, API, and Markup), this approach can provide rich user experiences to web applications that rely mostly on APIs and SaaS offerings. Because the HTML is rendered either in the web browser or at build time, the deployment model is the same as fully statically generated sites, with all its benefits: the attack surface on the server is small and great performance can be achieved with low resource usage. Such deployments are also ideal for a content delivery network. In fact, we toyed with the idea of labelling this technique as CDN first applications.
