Common pitfalls, challenges, and concerns with enterprise JAMStack

When heading out on your own to sink or swim for the first time as a Highly Paid Consultant (HPC), it helps to be over-prepared with solutions to these common pitfalls, challenges, and concerns with JAMStack in the enterprise.

Continuous Integration & Deployment

• CI/CD Pipelines
• Containerized builders & runtime environments
• Distributed secrets management
• Code quality and coverage reporting

Continuous integration and deployment involve validating code changes, processing them into release artifacts (e.g., building the project(s)), and publishing those artifacts to a specified environment.

Typically, there are at least two implicit environments: development (local) and production (remote). Other standard options are preview, staging, or next. Project-wide configuration values are a product of the defaults and current environment.

Developer Tooling

• Containerized application builders and runtimes
• Portable developer environments (GitPod, Dev Container, etc.)
• Automated linting & formatting
• Task orchestration (Ant, Gradle, Nx, Jenkins, Make, etc.)

While it may sound unintuitive, tool quality and user preference are rarely the determining factor or a significant concern for large organizations. Consistency, reproducibility, automation, and interoperability with other tools are more important considerations.

In addition to detailed platform-specific documentation in the README, projects often include an entire development environment for easy setup and guaranteed reproducibility [3]. Both GitPod and Microsoft Dev Container bundle a copy of Theia IDE, a web-based VSCode clone intended for this purpose.

Domain Modeling

• Schema definitions & data validation
• Change management (versioning)
• Transaction management (consistency)
• Relational data vs. document stores
• Automatic code generation

Design Systems

• Shared design vocabulary between stakeholders
• Design tokens are decisions codified as data

User Authentication & Authorization

• User authentication providers (SSO, OAuth2, LDAP, etc.)
• Role-based access protocols
• Distributed identity management and access control

Content Management

• Version control & revision management (branching, merging, release, etc)
• Role-based access controls
• Environment-based configuration

Reporting & Observability

• Automated logging report retention
• Usage of dead letter queues

Resources

1. https://www.netlify.com/blog/framework-popularity-on-netlify/ [2023]
2. https://open-next.js.org/inner_workings/architecture
3. Well, as much as anything can be guaranteed