The future of static sites is JavaScript-based and here’s why.

Serverless computing promises rapid deployment and unlimited scaling, while eliminating the need for managing servers, operating systems and even container runtimes. As the infrastructure team at Contentful, we want to enable our development teams to use this new paradigm and also reap the advantages ourselves in terms of reduced operational overhead. This is how we did it.

As support engineers, we tackle hundreds of user questions a month such as: How does Contentful work? What is content modeling? and How does content stored in Contentful get rendered on my web app? Once people understand it all, they're rewarded with fast sites, organized content and their build-to-ship process becomes impressively quick. If you just want to see what Contentful does in the most foolproof way possible, well, step into my office.

GraphQL and serverless are two important trends that both, interestingly enough, originated in late 2014 and are now the new mainstream entries in the technological toolbox of developers. According to Google Trends, AWS Lambda and GraphQL now have equal momentum in regards to microservices.

I was walking around the park a few days ago. It was a bright day with a clear sky. I could see kids playing and their parents chatting a few steps away. "This is nice," I thought, "but what about static site generators for PHP?" Well, that's obviously a made-up story. I wasn't at the park. It was actually raining. But that’s really what I was thinking.