assemblylift VS jamstack.org

AssemblyLift is an open platform for cloud-native application development. AssemblyLift provides a portable, function-oriented framework and WebAssembly-based runtime which can be deployed to AWS Lambda or Kubernetes. The AssemblyLift CLI generates HashiCorp Terraform infrastructure code from simple TOML definitions, and takes care of compiling and packaging functions and services for deployment. To make a clichéd comparison, think of it as Infrastructure on Rails 😛

Since our last post introducing the AssemblyLift v0.4-alpha series, we've had two new alpha releases which introduced some major additions & improvements!

Today we're making available the first alpha release of AssemblyLift v0.4. This initial release brings a few exiting improvements to AssemblyLift including

After nearly two years in part-time development, AssemblyLift has been through three major revisions, sitting now at v0.3.2.

In this guide we'll use AssemblyLift to deploy our Lambda function, and define our API and an authorizer. AssemblyLift is an open platform which allows you to quickly develop high-performance serverless applications. Service functions are written in the Rust programming language and compiled to WebAssembly. The AssemblyLift CLI takes care of compiling and deploying your code, as well as building and deploying all the needed infrastructure!

Normally what we've described above would be a pretty complicated set up (and a much longer article 😜). Luckily we can use AssemblyLift to do all the heavy work for us!

This article will walk through building and deploying a simple static site, served using AWS Lambda and API Gateway. To accomplish this we will use AssemblyLift, an open-source platform designed to quickly & easily accomplish such a task.

If you've never heard of it or just need a reminder, AssemblyLift is an open platform for developing cloud-native applications. At its core are the AssemblyLift Runtime and the AssemblyLift CLI. The runtime provides an environment for executing compiled WebAssembly (WASM) on infrastructure such as AWS Lambda, and is one of the more unique aspects of the platform which we'll dig into more below.

Service TOML definitions now support specifying authorizers by ID for each function. These map to API Gateway authorizers; currently only IAM and JWT are supported. See the pull request for examples.

Docusaurus is a Jamstack SSG (Static Site Generator) mainly intended for documentation and blog websites. It is a Meta Open Source project. Its configuration is done mainly through a JavaScript file called docusaurus.config.js.

Netlify has gained popularity among developers for its ease of use and powerful features. It's a great option for hosting static websites or Jamstack applications.

Jamstack Org

Jamstack architecture continues to gain popularity as a modern web development approach that focuses on pre-rendered content served from a CDN. Some benefits of Jamstack include better performance, lower cost, and greater scalability. Expect to see growth in Jamstack frameworks like Gatsby, Next.js and Nuxt.js in 2023.

More importantly, Netlify, the creator and stewards of the term Jamstack including it's canonical site, has largely abandoned the term as well, in favor of a "composable web" term that better aligns with their ambitions around becoming a broader enterprise platform including content (with tools like Netlify Connect).

I have been using the hosting environment provided by Netlify for years. I am aware there are several available including Vercelli and Heroku, to name a few, but Netlify was the first I tried and it continues to work well. It links into my Git repos on BitBucket and also offers Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) for experimentation and small projects. Netlify is also a prime advocate of the JAMStack architecture that is gaining considerable interest.

You should check out JamStack. The premise is that the majority of your site is static content and you can push it out to CDNs that are frequently cheap or free.

Perhaps this is worth checking out and utilizing when I have the time to attempt another JAMstack project. Possibly Eleventy?