Ask HN: how would you explain how/when you use Jamstack to a python backend dev? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: how would you explain how/when you use Jamstack to a python backend dev?

6 pointswhiskey1410 comments

My exp is in python flask/django/data science. Moved full stack recently on freelance gigs, and want to find out more about how/when people use Jamstack?

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I'd never use Jamstack.

Why?

Because Jamstack is used to build websites.

Any websites can be built 100x faster and cheaper using Wordpress + Elementor or Webflow.

If you're a freelancer, you can charge clients the same amount of money for less work while also keeping them more happy.

How will they be happier?

Because Jamstack requires a CDN, a build pipeline, and headless CMS. Too many moving parts = less robust infrastructure and higher maintenance costs.

Wordpress on a VPS is a single moving part.

When should you still use Jamstack anyway?

If you like cocktail parties with other developers, mentioning Jamstack might get you some attention.

That is a very reasonable approach.

Thanks for the response.

Is your use of ‘website’ intentional? As opposed to web application?

Website -> generally static so use classic web tool (which jamstack is alternative)

Web app -> classic user app with need for writing to db?

Your minimum classic web page architecture is something like this:

client -> webserver -> db

With the advent of CDNs for caching, someone thought "Hey, if my page is completely static, I might as well store it entirely on the CDN!".

Some advantages of this architecture:

- you don't need to manage a server / VM, a network nor a db.

- better latency as your page can be closer to clients, as most CDNs are globally distribuited

- does not have dbs as bottlenecks

- trivial to scale for high traffic scenarios

- potentially free for small projects

- static pages tend to be easier to test

Disadvantages:

- you're limited to static pages. anything that needs a login, a session, etc... is a showstopper*

- public endpoints. can`t use most CDNs for pages that only should be accessed from private networks

- potentially expensive for high traffic web pages

* some CDN providers now offer some sort of distributed storage / worker. YMMV.

Thanks for this.

I guess as a backend dev I see static pages as a cute website, rather than a full application, so struggle to see the huge benefit.

Unless I'm missing something, and you can cache most of the site as static, leaving a hole where the db content gets injected?

Totally, that's was the original (and still most common) use case for CDNs.

It may not answer your question directly, but I've used python with JAMstack to show (semi) updated information.

In my case, I needed to show real(ish) time inventory. Our inventory was stuck in an ERP system without an API. So I wrote a scraper that would pull out our inventory, write it to a bunch of markdown files, and push it to Netlify to rebuild the site using Hugo. This was on an hourly cron job.

Since then I've used python to build JAMstack sites from data in Google Sheets. I find that to be a happy medium for projects where there is no user input and I need to update the info somewhat regularly.

Okay cool, so sort of like with a db with only a read action. But the benefit is that it’s super quick load time because of cdn cache?

I also asked a similar question yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31938452

Which might have some insight.

I’m also a full stack dev that is a bit confused on who can actually benefit from static sites like this. Particularly when it involves marketing teams that need to manage content outside of the codebase.

I’m definitely not convinced by them yet.

Ah this is great, thanks.

I'm confused by the same thing. I just came across Strapi, which seems really cool for building CMSs but I'm not sure how it works exactly.

Will check out your thread

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