Jamstack Returns with Edge Runtimes
Thom Krupa, co-founder of Bejamas, on building dynamic apps on the Jamstack
The real shift is that Jamstack stops being a build first model and starts acting like the old request time web, except the server now sits near the user instead of in one central region. That means a page can be assembled when someone visits, with personalization, auth checks, or fresh data, without paying the full latency penalty of sending every request back to one origin server. It keeps the simple web request model, but moves execution onto the CDN layer.
-
In the earlier Jamstack model, teams prebuilt pages ahead of time and pushed static files to a CDN. That was fast, but large sites could end up with long build times and stale content windows. Edge runtimes changed the tradeoff by letting code run globally at request time.
-
The practical workflow is much closer to classic server rendering. A request comes in, code runs, HTML is generated, and the user gets a ready page. The difference is that platforms like Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare execute that logic from distributed edge locations instead of one app server.
-
That is why frameworks like Remix mattered in this moment. They pushed developers toward rendering on request again, but on infrastructure designed for low latency worldwide. The appeal was less about ideology and more about removing static generation bottlenecks while keeping pages fast.
Going forward, the market keeps moving toward full stack web apps that mix static delivery with edge execution. The winners are the platforms that make this feel simple, where a front end developer can ship dynamic pages, middleware, and data access globally without managing servers or regional infrastructure by hand.