Static site generators have been around for quite a while (think Jekyll), but their popularity has been increasing rapidly as of late. the euphoric embrace of the Jamstack by the web developer community has not gone unnoticed at Amazon and Microsoft.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) just recently hosted an online tech talk on Jamstack applications in which they demo the deployment of a Gatsby-powered website using Amazon S3, CloudFront, and Lambda@Edge.
This is not the first time that Amazon recognizes the existence of static site generators. The deployment of a pre-built website has been one of the many possible configuration examples for an AWS S3 bucket for a while. But the fact that AWS organizes a tech talk that goes into much detail of how to create an AWS-flavored Jamstack website is definitely noteworthy.
And just two weeks ago Microsoft announced a new web service for its cloud computing service Azure. This new service, which is called Static Web Apps, is currently available as preview. It promises all the conveniences of the Jamstack such as continuous web deployment. However, it only works with code repositories hosted on Github (surprise). There is no support for Bitbucket.
Despite the competition Netlify and Vercel still shine when it comes to how easy it is to set up a deployment workflow and how performant their CDNs are. The newly redesigned Netlify for instance, is so fast, it seems to have already fully loaded before I even finished typing the URL. Magic!