April 2022 Summaries

Netlify Edge Functions are a full serverless runtime environment powered by Deno, running on Netlify's network edge. They offer improved performance and faster execution times compared to traditional serverless functions, making them suitable for shorter, performance-critical operations. Edge Functions can be used with plain JavaScript or TypeScript code and provide an execution limit of 50 milliseconds. They also enable powerful applications with unrivaled performance by executing closest to the users' locations. With Deno as the runtime, Edge Functions are highly performant and start faster than equivalent Node.js applications. The use of open-source solutions like Deno follows web standards, allowing developers to work together on common solutions. Netlify Edge Functions integrate seamlessly with the Netlify workflow, making it easy to deploy and manage edge functions. They offer advanced features such as chaining, middleware and transformations, streaming data, and access to environment variables, enabling developers to build powerful applications with a great First Contentful Paint score.

The Remix Stacks template, the K-pop Stack, is a pre-built template that combines Remix, Supabase, Tailwind, and more to help users create a note creation app with authentication. This template can be deployed using Netlify without requiring any credit card information. To deploy the app, users need to add three environment variables to their Netlify project: SUPABASE_URL, SUPABASE_ANON_KEY, and SESSION_SECRET. With these variables set, the app is ready for deployment, which can be triggered by clicking the "Deploy to Netlify" button or running a command in the terminal. Users can work on the project locally using the Netlify CLI, installing dependencies, linking their Netlify project, and starting development with `npm run dev`. The K-pop Stack template provides a note creation app that users can customize for their own needs, such as creating a fan page to post notes about favorite songs and outfits.

Netlify has introduced Log Drains, a feature that allows developers to export traffic and functions logs directly to external monitoring providers such as Amazon S3, Datadog, New Relic, Logflare, and Sumo Logic. This enables advanced observability and debugging workflows, including search, slicing, and custom dashboards for reporting trends over time. Log Drains also provide a unified location for large teams to store their logs and errors in a single system. The feature is available on Enterprise plans and includes options for premium support, more powerful build compute, and access to the High-Performance Edge network.

A headless CMS is a backend content management system that separates the content repository from the frontend user interface layer, allowing it to deliver content to multiple "heads" such as mobile apps, chatbots, and voice-activated digital assistants. This approach offers several benefits including improved developer productivity, faster site performance, and increased security. Headless CMSes enable teams to select best-of-breed tools that work for their needs, allowing for a more agile and flexible workflow. They also offer advantages in scalability, internationalization and localization, content editing, API-first approaches, and security. Popular headless CMS platforms include Contentful, Strapi, Ghost, Forestry, Sanity, and Headless WordPress, each with their own strengths and use cases. By decoupling the frontend from the backend, headless CMSes provide a more efficient and effective way to manage content, enabling teams to focus on delivering high-quality experiences across multiple channels.

Netlify Edge Functions with SvelteKit is now available, providing closer execution of endpoints to site visitors, improved performance, and flexibility for dynamic content. SvelteKit is a framework for building applications with Svelte components, known for its compilation to JavaScript and server-side rendering. Edge Functions connect Netlify with Deno, an open runtime standard at the network edge, enabling use cases such as middleware, localization, authentication, and A/B testing. To enable Edge Functions with SvelteKit, developers can make a small change to the adapter configuration or install the Netlify adapter and update their svelte.config.js file. Netlify provides benefits for developers running SvelteKit, including customizable build workflows, faster feedback loops, and easier integrations. Developers can start using SvelteKit on Netlify today with a free Starter plan.

A headless CMS is a backend content management system that separates the content repository from the frontend user interface layer, allowing it to deliver content to multiple "heads" such as mobile apps, chatbots, and voice-activated digital assistants. This approach offers several benefits including improved developer productivity, faster site updates, better scalability, improved security, and easier internationalization and localization. Headless CMSes enable teams to select best-of-breed tools that work for their needs, allowing content creators, content editors, development teams, and end users to focus on their area of expertise without being constrained by a monolithic platform. With the ability to serve content to multiple heads, headless CMSes can deliver omnichannel content and improve site performance, Core Web Vitals, and SEO rankings. Popular headless CMS platforms include Contentful, Strapi, Ghost, Forestry, Sanity, and Headless WordPress, each offering unique features and customization options for building a Jamstack project.

Netlify has increased the usage limits for its bandwidth and build minutes on its Pro and Business plans, with a significant increase in allowed build minutes and bandwidth allocation. The changes are part of Netlify's efforts to cost optimize its build system and network infrastructure. With these new increases, developers can now build and deploy more projects without worrying about hitting their bandwidth or build minute limits. Additionally, Netlify has introduced a new per-domain bandwidth usage reporting feature in the billing tab of the console, allowing users to easily track their monthly bill. The price of going over the new bandwidth limit has also been increased to $55 per 100GB.

Next.js Middleware allows modification of responses based on a user's incoming request or location, enabling features like localization, personalization, authentication, and A/B testing. On Netlify, Next.js Middleware can run at the edge, improving performance and reducing latency, and can also be used with static pages or Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) to add dynamic magic to prerendered pages. Edge Functions offer more flexibility and power in transforming responses, allowing developers to process responses chunk by chunk without waiting for them to fully load, resulting in less latency and better memory usage.

Netlify has announced the public beta launch of Edge Functions, a new serverless runtime powered by Deno, which enables developers to run serverless JavaScript/TypeScript functions right from Netlify's Edge network. This allows for full control over transforming requests and responses, streaming server-rendered content, or even running an entire application at the edge. Edge Functions works seamlessly with web frameworks that support these capabilities and is available on all plans for no additional cost. It offers various features such as streaming edge rendering, React Server Components, content rewrites, user redirection, A/B testing, OAuth authentication, geolocation, localization/globalization, and more. Netlify has also been working closely with JavaScript framework ecosystems to ensure that Edge Functions work great with them on day one.

Convex is a global state management platform designed for dynamic application developers, allowing them to transform local React apps into fully-distributed applications deployed globally on Netlify. By using Convex, developers can obviate the need for complex error-prone application logic and easily manage global state, including deploying a backend, interacting with a database, caching, and synchronizing data between client and server. The platform provides a backend database to store state, allows querying of state via server functions written in JavaScript or TypeScript, and includes client libraries that synchronize state between client and server. With Convex, developers can create global applications with automatic rerendering of browser components when the output of a server function changes, eliminating the need for manual synchronization of data.

The Headless Commerce Summit is a two-day hybrid event in London on May 23-24, 2022, bringing together digital marketing leaders, individual technologists, and digital agencies to discuss the future of e-commerce with a decoupled approach. The summit will cover strategic business cases for going headless, shared key metrics, and tactical advice from companies with unique experiences in D2C retail, subscription services, and traditional brick-and-mortar retail who have gone headless. The event is designed for those building performant e-commerce experiences with a decoupled approach, including digital native retailers, traditional retailers, and more. With a mix of talks, speakers, and networking opportunities, the summit aims to provide insights into the ever-growing headless commerce ecosystem and help attendees leave with a better understanding of what's new in headless commerce and how to implement it effectively.

Netlify has added a new General HTTP Endpoint option for Netlify Log Drains, allowing Enterprise plan users to configure their website's traffic and function logs to be exported to any log management provider that supports URL-based authentication and accepts JSON-formatted logs. This feature enables users to build custom log drain integrations with popular providers like Logtail, which offers features such as live log tailing, easy-to-build custom views, and powerful notification and monitoring integrations. To use this option, users need to create a Logtail account, configure their Netlify log drain, and construct a full URL for the general HTTP endpoint. The new feature also includes some enhancements, such as improved formatting options and support for NDJSON format, and is expected to be further expanded in upcoming months.

Astro, a framework focused on content sites, is evolving with the introduction of server-side rendering (SSR) support, expanding its application to larger CMS-backed sites and e-commerce platforms. This new feature simplifies template syntax, allowing for mostly HTML-based templates with sprinkles of JavaScript where needed. API routes are also introduced, enabling non-HTML requests such as POST requests for user profile updates or GET requests for dynamically retrieving JSON data. Astro's SSR support is being deployed to Netlify, a popular platform for deploying static sites, and can be used in conjunction with Netlify Functions, which enable building dynamic applications quickly. With this feature, developers can handle redirects, 404s, and other dynamic response codes directly in their templates, as well as handle non-GET HTTP methods and API calls from the client.

Today, the team at Netlify is introducing a new "Disco theme" for their documentation site, which allows users to toggle between different modes, including System, Light, Dark, and Disco. The Disco theme was initially created as an internal hackathon project and has now been made available to all users. This feature adds a fun element to the Netlify documentation experience and is part of the company's "Care Deeply, Have Fun" values. The team hopes that this new feature will improve the overall user experience and provide more flexibility for readers. The Disco theme includes some animation that may be problematic for certain readers, so users are warned to exercise caution when using it.

Netlify has released several new features and updates, including Log Drains for New Relic, Lighthouse Score Visualizations, New and Improved Pull Request Comments, a Next.js Toolbox Template, Sweeter Site Names, and additional announcements such as Netlify Graph and Scheduled Functions. These updates aim to improve troubleshooting, observability, accessibility, and user experience on the platform. The new features are available for developers on Netlify's Enterprise plans and can be accessed through various settings in the Netlify UI.

WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) used by over ⅓ of the web, but its traditional monolithic approach has low developer satisfaction scores. Headless WordPress, on the other hand, offers a decoupled architecture that separates frontend UI management from backend services, allowing developers to use different languages and frameworks while giving content editors the same familiar WordPress user interface. This setup enables a win-win situation for everyone involved. Traditional WordPress benefits include ease of building fully functional websites in little time, a rich plugin ecosystem, baked-in preview functionality, but it has drawbacks such as hard customization, slow builds, and site performance issues. Headless WordPress architecture separates frontend and backend services, giving developers flexibility, control, cross-platform publishing, and improved performance and security. With headless WordPress, content editors can use the same familiar interface they know and love, while developers get to build using their preferred frameworks and workflows, resulting in a better balance between ease of use for non-technical teams and customization options for development teams.