SAN FRANCISCO -- The workflows and technologies required for modern web development are undergoing dramatic reinvention. Netlify, a San Francisco based company serving a large base of passionate web developers, has seen the transformation first hand. They've engineered a new platform for the web where content and applications are created directly on a global network, bypassing the need to ever setup or manage servers. Today, Netlify announced they have raised an additional $30M with Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and the founders of Slack, Yelp, and Figma all participating
"Most sites still connect you to a single location, where servers generate each page as its requested. With modern apps, we've hit the limits of that architecture." said Jeff Hunter, CTO of Barstool Sports. "It's too slow, especially on mobile devices. Netlify provided us a better answer: pre-build and globally distribute our web apps, so we don't have the performance hit or security risks of doing it on the fly. Now we don't need an army of web servers -- Netlify automatically publishes everything across every major cloud provider. That type of reliability used to cost millions."
Prebuilding and distributing apps ahead of time, the basic concept of the JAMstack -- an idea borrowed from mobile development -- is catching on in the web developer community. "Running any web property without origin servers is an arresting concept, but the clear future of the web platform," adds GitHub founder Tom Preston Warner. "In less than five years, you'll build your next complex web application this way."
To pull off the new architecture, Netlify needed to give developers a git-centric workflow, something that supports the move away from server applications towards APIs and microservices. Netlify's Application Delivery Network removes the last remaining dependency on origin infrastructure, allowing companies to host the entire application globally.
"Netlify is tackling an ambitious goal," said Kleiner Perkins general partner Mamoon Hamid. "In a sense, they are completely rethinking how the modern web works. The response to what they are doing has been overwhelming and early traction really shows they have struck a chord with the developer community and organizations seeking to build high-performing and secure websites, at a low cost."
Netlify believes all sites on the internet will be powered by application delivery networks as the technology advances.
"The cloud made it faster, easier, and cheaper to provision servers, VMs, and containers." said Mathias Biilmann, Netlify Founder and CEO. "But more devices always bring more complications. Customers have come to us with AWS environments that have dozens or even hundreds of them for a single application. Our goal is to remove the requirement for those servers completely. We're not trying to make managing infrastructure easy. We want to make it totally unnecessary."
"This is where the web is going," commented Chris Coyier, CSS expert and co-founder of Codepen. "Netlify is just bringing it to us all a lot faster. With all the innovation in the space, this is an exciting time to be a developer."
Netlify