The Modern DXP: How JAMstack will change the world

[Music] [Music] today we will talk about how gemstack will change the world of the digital experience platforms and you know a dxp or a digital experience platform sounds really enterprisey and you know what it is but i am here to tell you that every website actually has a dxp and we will jump into what a dxp is in a sack and also why jam stack and the fact that it's origin less is changing the game for this so before we dive in let's talk a bit about who i am a bit of an introduction of why i feel like i can talk about this stuff to you right so my name is tim as i said tim manix and this is me on twitter it's either here or here depending on how i edit this and i work at uniform where i am a developer advocate later on in the talk i will talk about what uniform is and how it helps the subject of this talk which is jamstack and the modern digital experience platform i am also representing cloudanary and next in their ambassador programs and i've worked with these companies all the time for years and they're awesome so i'm proud to actually represent them i am also a conference speaker and this is actually 3ds amsterdam when we're still allowed to um go places right i spoke on a bunch of years and this was just an awesome conference so i also do youtube so if you are watching this video on youtube potentially click subscribe if you want you don't have to but you know would be cool all right so why me why do i get to talk about this stuff other than that i have experience speaking in conferences well i used to work as a director of web development at vaultec and also as a web developer at akqa who are two huge agencies and they're doing advertisement but they're also building e-commerce platforms from modern tech to old-school tech to a whole bunch right so i have worked within these companies for clients like these and this is not here to gloat but it's it's kind of just to show you that i have have experience with brands who are on huge skill who do enterprise software stuff but need modern stacks right nike needs to be modern it needs to work fast and all of those brands have this and i've been in the trenches for years working with these companies to actually get to where you can get now much easier and that's also what this talk is about so now let's actually dive in are you ready to talk about jam stack i am let's rock let's talk about what a digital experience platform actually is right so dxps have been around for a while and they are kind of stuffy enterprisey things that marketers love to talk about right and it's kind of a thing you see on linkedin and so kind of what they do is they combine multiple tools and services to actually create a platform and so whatever this dxp consists of is actually usually chosen by marketers right so they like things like the following they're like of course content management but also having newsletter subscriptions and services behind that right so digital asset management videos campaigns things like that personalization a b testing crm stuff analytics so you kind of see what those things are right and this kind of is what dxp is it's like it's not just your website or your cms the dxp provides extra context to the your whole platform basically so your end user is part of your dxp but your content editor is also one or your marketeer or your analytics person or your tester the dxp is a bit bigger and generally one big system controls your whole dxp so think about acquia with drupal or think about sitecore or adobe aem and i know there's a whole bunch of developers watching now that are amazing front-end devs but they are kind of unhappy in their sitecore system or in their adobe system because they cannot go fully free because this is also part of this talk this like originally the dxp is controlled by this one big thing or like a wordpress and there's of course different scopes to it right because wordpress does a lot less than what let's say adobe aem does but still they're big systems they're one-offs and so we call this the best of suite and this is kind of one of the most tacky pictures i could find of this lovely gentleman anyways so now let's explore a little bit of the drawbacks of this traditional dxp setup where one big suite of tools from one company basically deals with all of it for you right so just i'm just looking at this picture of how i don't know what the hell i'm looking at like why is he holding a dollar why is he not playing why is slash actually mid solo and anyways let's continue so the first big drawback of this traditional dxps is that they're all based on an origin right this origin is your content delivery server and this server has a bunch of extra services on top where all the other things happen like the a b testing and the front end and databases and you know because it's one big chunk of software that's always on if you just want to iterate on one part it's pretty challenging right because does that one part influence a lot of other things or is it maybe dependent on other things and you cannot just change it and of course you can always change everything if you take sitecore i know for a fact you can change out every bit it just costs a lot of effort time and money right and so if you deploy something you tend to always deploy everything the whole suite and of course that's kind of scary but because it's so big it takes very long it's just challenging stuff that's no need i've had discussions with people that say yeah our backend engineers spend two days on the deploy because everything needs to be in place and then we just like put the package on the system and then hope it works right and so like i said it's always on and this just costs money and energy because what if you don't use your wist list much wouldn't it be nice if that was just off and these services wouldn't actually be always on and operating it's it's so much nicer if you if it's not one big chunk of software and if you want to skill let's say that wishlist because there are so many people around christmas time that actually use your wish list you kind of have to scale all the servers with all the software because it's again one chunk and you know if you want to replace one part or one part it's actually it's very doable i've done this my whole career it's just a lot of effort and like why does it have to be so hard um so one of the bigger ones and i know a lot of front-end developers watching this talk will will fill this one there's the fender lock in and you kind of have to be inside whatever that vendor chose for you to use and then just use that because if the vendor decides to update something and you like said okay let's put the patch of defender like the version two and everything dies because you didn't follow what defender told you to do you are kind of screwed because then you have to tell your client i need four weeks to fix this website now right so you have less choice and of course this is a fun one you have a bunch of professional services and certification stuff where basically people that know the system really well cost you 2 000 a day and come and help you because it's so complex and because it's so complex you can also offer certification and make a bunch of money as a vendor personally i don't like this marketing approach or this approach of how to make money a system shouldn't be that crazy complex right it shouldn't be one big spaghetti of crazy you kind of want to do that in a different way where you don't need a certification because you're just a good front-end dev so why do i need certification for a certain tool i just work with front-end technology yeah i'm a bit on edge about that part and then of course if the vendor decides to go a certain direction with their cloud offering or with their technology you have to follow if you if you don't follow you don't get updates right so all these things together kind of go to this it's expensive it takes time and a lot of clients don't have this kind of money and if they do wouldn't you love for these clients to actually focus on the end user experience and do really meaningful websites i guess you can almost not say no to that right so in short marketers love these dxps because they get all the super cool tools that they can use in the system but can developers kind of hate it because those tools are not the they're not to be used the way developers want to use them you have to follow a certain um structure to do so and marketers of course don't have that drawback they just get the product and it's like awesome so i'm not here to talk down on marketers it's just there's these different approaches to a system right but the future will look very different you can actually also build these dxps in a completely different way and that's what this talk is about and how we can allow you to do that right so you can actually compose this dxp from different products that are called best of breed so a best of breed product is the opposite of a best of sweet product like a best of sweet is a suite of tools from one offering or one vendor this is your thing and then you have best of breed which are smaller chunks generally that are highly specialized in one part and then you have to compose multiple small parts to become that then become one bigger group of stuff that becomes your platform right so if you do this developers will really love that because those things are separate they need to be orchestrated but they are so good at what they do that you can just use them as a surface and you can build your own let's say front end or back end and then just combine these things you have much more freedom to to like choose your tech stack but also to choose which best of breed surface fits your brand most and especially if you don't want one you just drop it and that that works because it's all composed together from smaller chunks right and you know what the marketing stuff actually gets better but we'll talk about that in a sec so to really try to explain what um the difference is between the best of breed and the best of sweet i just i came up with this sandwich analogy and you know what i put it on twitter and it actually worked a lot of my peers actually answered with stuff that i was like oh this analogy can go a long way and it actually works so i'm going to try this on you and please in the chat tell me did it convince you or not and do you now have a good understanding of what the difference is between best of breed systems and better best of sweet systems oh yeah this joey with his favorite sandwich giving it to his friend but actually not anyways fun context so in my opinion what i'm thinking i'm going to tell you is that best of sweet is a sandwich that is pre-packed created by the baker or the bakery for you exactly they know what you like it is a complete sandwich and you're happy with it right and then the best of breed is actually a decomposed sandwich where you can choose the ingredients that go on but you better be good at what you choose because if you put the wrong ingredient on that's a disgusting sandwich right so let's see let's talk about best of sweet in the sandwich realm first so at a bakery you get a complete sandwich its design is created for you by the bakery right so there's not that much thinking required because the baker is awesome and this generally works for most people if you work in paris like where i work i go outside i go to a bakery i get a sandwich and it's awesome and it is 95 of the times that is true right so you have basically one contract with that baker if you go every day if the sandwich sucks or makes you sick you just go back to the bakery and say hey that this sandwich that sucked and i can point the finger to that baker and say i either don't go back to you or you fix the sandwich for next time right it's a very easy connection and so when the chant which changes in the future it's kind of fine right because you chose that baker you trust the guy and if the sample changes it's fine the bakery probably knows what's good for you this is their whole business and so this is kind of how the best of sweet software systems work and bakeries that is let's now talk about best of breed with a deconstructed sandwich or as i like to call from now on the best of bread basically what this thing does is that you go to different shops to create your own sandwich right so you are in charge of the taste and makeup of that sandwich yourself right if one ingredient is out of stock you kind of have to deal with that how do you change the ingredients the rest so that you don't miss something right how do you orchestrate things or how do you cook your own stuff right so you better be a good chef like i said before because otherwise if you don't really know what you're doing all your future sandwiches are gonna be pretty miserable it's not gonna be a fun time right so the thing is though if you did do it yourself and you buy your own stuff you can really replace the cheese at any time you want and if you need more cheese you just find the fender that gives you the cheese in bulk right now i'm in the countryside i'm in an old house and there's cows all around me i can just go to one of these farms and say give me more cheese and it's only one farm i have to go to and it's done that's pretty cool right i just have to know that that cheese is good and also judge if it's good cheese or not and so if it's around christmas time and i still don't have enough cheese we can actually replace it with something else or maybe i don't want the cheese anymore and i want foie gras this is easy you just change it up right at that time you find another farm you go to you get some foie gras you put it in so between those two you kind of have to choose your sandwich you know what is for you and generally the traditional dxp is the sandwich from the bakery and the new modern dxb is actually the deconstructed sandwich so before i go on let's marvel at how bad this image is the mustache the apple watch before it existed the dollar sign it's like dude what's up with this anyways i think now that we talked about all these differences let's just have a look at how you can actually compose your dxp with using these best of breed technologies it's also the so i can show you what those best of breed technologies are because we didn't really talk about that just yet so this is a simplified version of what i think a digital experience platform could look like and of course if you had much more commerce related things it would be even bigger right you have stock keeping tax calculation there's a lot more stuff so let's talk about a composed one right so my cdn could be cloudflare my build nci stack could be azure pipelines i could use lambda functions as apis that i make myself my own microservices i could use next.js in gemstack mode for for for my front end i can use figma or zepplin or something like that for the design and build tools i use edgeworkers in cloudflare to actually do my server side generation of my jam stack when i need it when something changes and i can use contentful as a cms i can use uniform for personalization we'll talk about that later um you can use a digital asset management like cloudani you can use user data from gigia and plausible for analytics and maybe some api platforms like commerce tools for e-commerce fit in there as well so as you can see there is no origin here all these services are on their own right so you just connect them together and they all have their own origin and deal with whatever they have to do but you sign an sla so they have uptime and it works so this is how i feel like you have the traditional dxp which is elon in 1999 and then we have to compose dxp where this is elon probably 2018 i don't know he looks kind of badass or he tries to be anyways there's a pretty big difference right so i would say the future is doing this dxp with the jam stack without the origin without the slowness everything on the edge connecting the edge up and making sure that the best of breed software actually does their job the best and the developer and the architect chose how that works complete freedom complete transparency right so developers are really finally able to choose the stack that they want and that's what makes this so cool right so now let's talk a bit about uniform and why this all this whole talk and uniform fit together because i haven't actually told you just yet so uniform kind of exists to connect the world of these marketers with their dsps and their tools with developers and their tool chain right because you always have this battle between the developer wants some idealistic thing on the cloud with microservices and a static front-end with react which is really awesome but that doesn't fit with the tool chain that the marketers actually are used to and always work with and uniform exists to connect those two worlds and that's why i love this startup because i have worked in those worlds i always worked with enterprise software i worked at ad agencies where we had to build with that software but i'm also front end dev in my whole career i've been fighting with those systems to get it to have a modern front end so the end user had the best experience and now these guys bottled that effort up into a product that helps you to orchestrate all of this right so with this which is pretty cool in my opinion with this new modern gemstack approach for dxps you don't have to re-platform every five years right i had adobe for five years but now the headless thing i don't like it what they did it doesn't work so now i'm just going to go to episerver and do the same thing and in five years i'm going to go to sitecore if it still exists at that time right and so now when you have this composed platform you can just change the tools that you need at the time that you need them you don't have to re-platform the whole thing and uniform helps you to orchestrate that right so this is what they say on the website this is my first day i'm gonna learn all of this right but basically uniform provides painkillers for this modern dxp like how to deal with the things that are hard because orchestrating is actually hard right how do you know if a service doesn't work will my website fail if i don't have that dependency or how do i scale it how does it work with the cloud with finance with all the programs like hub deployment sea ice it's complex to orchestrate and uniform created a really cool interface to actually make this work um so basically on top of that which is one of my favorite things is like we always like personalization right if you go to a conference and you buy a ticket but you haven't paid yet but you go away from the website you come back wouldn't it be cool if the header of the website said hey you have that thing in your basket from last time do you want to buy it now or maybe this conference has different tracks right marketing tracks tech tracks and i don't know let's let's keep it at marketing in tech right and then you click on the tech track you want to see that and you go back to the home page now suddenly the homepage actually reflects the fact that you are interested in technology and shows you different tracks of what you know different videos things like that this stuff we've always wanted it and it is possible with traditional dxps it's just really really hard to do and so you have all these extra contexts in a dxp right where you have a b testing you have personalization you have analytics based on that that stuff you have all these extra things and then uniform is going to jump on the train of all those contexts and give you the best tools to help you to do it and so they came up with personalization either on hydration time in your jam stack or with edge-based um like workers right so you don't need javascript javascript to see your personalized content and they have integrated this with a whole bunch of headless cmss and it's just really really cool to say and what they have on top which is kind of how they started which is fun for me to see is there's all these enterprise systems out there and people want to change to the new technology but it's really hard because you have a long time running contract and that long contract you cannot just change it you have to talk to all the stakeholders it's politic political there's money involved and so what uniform did is they made a system based on nextgs but now also with next where they're kind of in the build gem stackify the old pages and then surf it through next on the cdn as a static website and this is not a talk on how that is done but it's really genius how they figured that out because they also made sure like let's say you did it with react right you grab your old pages it's just put in as html with your old jquery stuff but there's this one component that you want to do with react you can actually build that and then next that they use to show you the gemstack stuff we'll just grab that react component and just render it as react but then the rest is still the old stuff and so you have a safe path to the future with a really cool way to get all the developers on board and show the differences and if you can then also do all these edge worker stuff and personalization and super performance and you know what no security testing because it's jam stack it's a pretty easy sell to at one point just move everything to jam stack and build your dxp without an origin right so they also connect to a whole bunch of other surfaces like cloudflare ash or whatever it's it's just they are the glue between all these surfaces like they help orchestrate and you know what that was it i want to thank you for watching and all this way we're now 22 minutes in so that's pretty long um please feel free to follow me on twitter or subscribe to me on youtube and also find uniform on twitter i'll put that in the description and yeah thanks for watching and i'll see you next time cheers