HACKER Q&A
📣 brkumar

How to judge if a SaaS service can be moved to JAMstack?


I am interested in understanding how does one go about planning a migration of a dynamic SaaS site to a JAMstack based site. I am aware that smashing magazine has managed this successfully (they are now really fast). However, they are a media house and do not have interactivity that one expects from a modern SaaS site. What parameters would you use to judge such migration?

  👤 godot Accepted Answer ✓
JAM stack isn't just for content sites and depending on your site specifically, it may or may not be a good fit. The API layer is not necessarily just HTTP GET /something/.

Let's say you run a small SaaS site, let's say it's a geoip lookup service, one of the more feasible type of small SaaS you can run by yourself. The features you may need are, say, a landing page, some documentation, a sign up and login process, accepting payments, and some admin management tool. All of above can reasonably be implemented in a JAM stack site. Things like the admin console page can have a lot of the page's structure statically displayed and dynamic data filled in from API calls.

IMO, "migrating" a web app from a traditional web app stack (LAMP, Rails, MERN, etc.) is an architectural redesign and depending on your existing codebase, could be a full rewrite. It's a paradigm shift. You may want to evaluate the cost of that vs the benefit.

👤 PaulHoule
I think "JAMstack" is for content, not interactive services. If your 'service' can be reduced to

HTTP GET /something/

I think JAMstack can do it, but if it involves looking something up in a database, writing something into a database, etc. that is out-of-scope.