Opening Keynote: From Jamming to Composing

From Jamming to Composing

Matt Biilmann

Hi everyone and welcome to the very first edition of Netlify Compose! I hope you enjoyed the welcome reception last night and that you'll have an amazing day today.

Now 7 years ago here in San Francisco, we were standing on another stage giving a talk about the new frontend stack, and that was when we introduced the term Jamstack to the world. Back then, it was a pretty radical idea of fundamentally decoupling the web UI layer from all the backend business logic, moving away from the monoliths at the time to really turn the web UI into its own self-standing application.

We did it at a time where we really had to come up with a name for this category because there was barely an ecosystem around us. It was early stage, like open source projects, a few of the headless CMSes had just gotten started. Contentful was a Series A startup at the time, focusing a lot on being a multi-channel CMS rather than focusing on the web. There was no mature ecosystem, no commercial frontend frameworks. It was a very different time, and we were just a seed stage company getting our feet off the ground.

Now fast forward to today, 7 years later, there's an amazing ecosystem around us. Billions of dollars of venture capital have flown into the space. There are so many partners here today that are building around this way of building for the web.

In many ways, the Jamstack approach to building for the web has basically become a synonym for the modern web. When we started out, we had to convince people to change their architecture or they fundamentally wouldn't be able to use Netlify. Today, any modern frontend framework runs on Netlify. We've gone from being an early stage company to a multi-billion dollar valuation, to thousands of customers across all verticals and industries, serving more than a billion unique visitors to sites, stores, and apps running on our Edge network every single month.

We’re at this point where the adoption of the Jamstack is really crossing the chasm from the early adopters that adopt in part because they want to be on the forefront of technology, know new things, and constantly seeking to learn and expand to the more pragmatic early majority of adopters that are adopting for business reasons because they want to see real-world business results, and they want something proven to the market that can make their outcomes better.

So we're going in many ways from an early age of jamming where this was all adopted by often early stage tech companies, by greenfield projects, often companies building with a single framework or snuck into big companies through shadow IT, to an age of composing where we're really starting to see large companies migrate their core web architecture to modern web architecture across lots of different frameworks and projects, taking really long-term architectural decisions as they think through this.

We'll hear later today from Forrester around their view of the composable space, but Gartner had a questionnaire where they asked Architects, “If you were launching a digital experience solution today, would you go composable or a standard monolith?”. Back in 2020, 12% said that they would aim for a composable solution. In 2023, it was 70%. Gartner estimates that the ones that pick that composable solution will outpace their competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation and the time to market. So that's where we are today.

When we think about from today to the next 7 years, what do we see happening in the market? Well, obviously we've said the word “composable” for a while, and we think it's going to be a big market trend carrying us forward as large companies are fundamentally looking to modernize their core web architecture. But also, I came here in a self-driving robot car, and generative AI is all around us. It'll make huge changes to the world in the next 7 years, and we'll keep seeing the human-computer interface undergo an amazing pace of change as new devices and AI are leading us to innovate and adapt, all with an underlying reality of economic uncertainty.

So when you think about composable, why are companies looking to this architecture, and why is it important? For a long time, there's always been this trade-off between building and buying, and for a long time, large companies would aim to buy their core web architecture. They would buy some monolith and say, "This is what we use to build for the web," and they all found that you can't buy an off-the-shelf solution and differentiate. You end up looking like an off-the-shelf solution.

So there's this motion more towards building, where composable is more like building. You want to craft the digital experience that sets your company apart, the user experience that sets your company apart and reaches your customers online in a way that's unique to you. But you want to buy the components. You don't want your developers to spend their time reinventing CMSes or e-commerce or building operational pipelines, release management, and so on, right? You want to spend the developers that are key to this, because you can't build something differentiated without developers. You want to spend those developers in really building digital experiences, and not on all the other stuff.

When we look at AI, there are so many questions to what it will mean for us in the next years to come. But there's one thing that's pretty certain that I think everyone can agree on, and that's that it will mean acceleration. More content, more code, more assets, more components to integrate. Things will move faster, and we believe that it will mean more developers.

There’s this economic law called Jevons Paradox that says when the cost of a resource goes down, demand goes up. We expect as the cost of custom development goes down, demand will go up. We'll need more and more developers to keep up with this.

We also think this will lead to a new battle for the platform. When we first launched Netlify and we were out raising funding, a common question was, “Why the web? Isn't everything just going to be mobile apps or social networking sites and so on?”. We took a hot bet on the web. But every time one of these big changes has come out, big companies have tried to use it as a way of building a walled garden where they become the platform instead of having an open platform. We'll see that battle play out again for sure.

Then we have user interfaces. We've seen a lot of acceleration in what's expected from a user interface on the web over the last 10 years. The next 7 years will only move us faster along. In part because we'll see whole new types of user interfaces that will require new tooling and new skills. We have AR devices coming out from both Apple and Meta that'll change what we need to build. OpenAI is already rumored to be talking with Jonathan Ive about what an AI device will look like, and we're sure to see those start coming out.

AI itself will lead us to reinvent a lot of how we actually interface with computers. That'll lead to many more different types of frameworks and experiences and new skills required. So companies must architect for change. If already now there's a sense that you can't buy an off-the-shelf solution, put it out there, and expect to differentiate when all of this is taking place, it'll be impossible. You cannot buy a tool and expect to be able to keep up. You have to architect for change and for being able to adapt constantly. All of this in a world where high-interest rates will keep being a thing, cash and funding will keep being expensive, and markets will value highly efficient companies.

When we think about the composable trade-off with building versus buying, it needs to be a highly efficient process where you can really use developers to build what's unique to your company and to differentiate and buy components for the rest. When you think about this whole AI Revolution, there'll be huge pressure to use AI in a way that drives efficiency and drives down cost. When you think about all the changes that lead to digital experiences and digital transformations, you cannot just pay your way to keep up with the changes. You need to architect for it and be smart about it.

Now as we look into those 7 years, in this new battle for the platform we've always bet on the web and we're betting on the web again. We think we can make the web the best place to build these amazing digital experiences with composable architectures. We've always bet on developers, and we keep betting on developers. We want to build an amazing platform for developers. We want to continue to innovate there.

Then we want to monetize and help the large companies out there that are now looking to fundamentally alter their core web architecture to keep up with the times and de-risk that process for them. So they can ship faster, ship securely, and connect everything and build anything.

When we launched Netlify, it was really seeing that we had a vision around this Jamstack architecture. We had looked at the practitioners building in that way, but it was a hard and arduous process. We thought, “Okay, what do we need to build to make it a really frictionless process and unleash this architecture so the web can progress?”. In a very similar way, we've been looking at all the large companies starting to go composable and said, “What do we need to build as a platform to make it easy to orchestrate components and enable all the stakeholders — the architects, the developers, and the marketeers to be successful with this architecture?”. That's what we are here to show you today, the Netlify Composable Platform for the web. I'm going to head this off to Dr. Claire who will start showing you how to build anything.

Build Anything with Netlify Core

Dr. Claire Knight

It's me. Hey Mom, I'm on the TV. Hello everyone. Welcome to our conference. I'm Claire. I'm a Director of Engineering at Netlify. I've been here for almost 2 years, and I'm super excited to share some of the things we've been doing in the last year with you.

As Matt mentioned, today we're announcing the Netlify Composable Web Platform. I'm thrilled to talk about one of the foundational pieces of this platform, one that we launched over 7 years ago. We've advanced it incredibly in that time, and now we are calling it Netlify Core. It's the solution in our platform that truly enables you to build anything. When I say "build anything," you might be wondering what I mean.

It's a combination of many things, and I'm super excited to share some of those with you today. It's features that make your developers' lives easier, getting pages and campaigns live faster, driving higher conversions, expanding ways to build anything you want so your website, store, or app can deliver personalization, unparalleled performance, and enterprise-grade security. It's an expanded set of integrations and an ecosystem that makes building anything so much easier. Let's dive in. What have we been building?

Okay, so I'm really tempted to talk about Netlify Dev, command-line tool, custom live URLs. By default, a development server runs on a developer’s machine, but sometimes you might need to share your work, you need feedback, or whatever. You can share the link so anyone can view your site in real time as you develop it. Our ChatGPT plugin can help you build a site. Yep, AI can create the Matrix on the web. We're doomed. That's it, don't need any of us.

This was a small prompt using the ChatGPT plugin, which, if you have access to that, go play, see what it will build, and drop onto the Netlify platform for you. Especially cache control headers. You wouldn't believe how excited these few lines of code can make developers.

But I know that you are not going to be swayed by features. You want to solve problems. People do not buy platforms; they buy solutions, and you want an easier life, right? I do. Don't we all? So let's look at a few of the things we've been doing to make our customers' lives easier and how that might help you. Perhaps you have sprawling infrastructure and tooling, including CMSes that have evolved or been added to over time, acquisitions, things like that.

Is your bandwidth spiraling out of control, or have you become a victim of your own success? The business is taking off, but your website's holding you back. You're too scared to put out a new version of your website because the teams are afraid to touch it, or you need your teams, whatever their size, to be empowered. Then you've come to the right place. Netlify can help you.

So let's start with our marketing friends. You've got objectives, you've got goals, marketing qualified leads, brand presence, yeah. But often the technology is a blocker rather than an enabler. We've always cared about great experiences for your customers. Performance is one of those, and our High-Performance Edge network has long given you an edge, pun very much intended. Performance metrics are important because they're everything.

Netlify gives you lightning-fast websites, which gives you the highest conversion. And how you build your frontend matters a lot. Netlify now provides you with real-time feedback on how key metrics for this looks. It's gold for the marketing and performance-oriented user. These metrics are based on data from actual visitor interactions on your site. It's real-world feedback.

Deploy Previews have been on Netlify since 2016, and in 2021, we made them even better with collaborative Deploy Previews. So you can view proposed changes before they go live, share feedback. And then, the Netlify Drawer already allows you to draw on screenshots, record a video, and add notes, as you can see in the video that's playing. And oh boy do we have something exciting coming up for you in about 15 minutes.

Which brings me onto our next thing, integrations. As you saw in the Deploy Preview video, we already integrate with many source code control systems and issue trackers. But you want to do more, and integrations allow for that. We've had build plugins for years, but the launch last month of the SDK gives us the capability to have even deeper and wider integrations and to leverage data from any and all of your CMSes or even proprietary systems. Again, much more detail coming up very soon.

And finally, we have personalization. The use of third-party cookies might have become problematic. Yeah, I'm one of those countries that has GDPR and things like that and banners and pop-ups. You can still engage with your customer using our build and our Edge Functions to deliver a custom experience, and even better, it's without client-side JavaScript, which also helps with performance.

Okay, convince the marketing team.

Now let's not panic the organization. I get it. You want to adopt an incremental approach. You need a smooth transition. You need to get buy-in along the way. You want to have a demonstrate-able value add. Our solutions for incremental adoption using things like our redirect APIs, which have been solving this for large enterprises for some time, get an even bigger boost with the addition of Edge Functions, which can address even more complex and sophisticated needs.

There are so many ways to handle redirects on Netlify. Our redirect engine is a super-powerful tool. We offer a redirect file, which you can see on the screen here in the root of the site. And we can also handle configuration inside our Netlify toml file, which allows adding custom headers, query parameters, and checking for JSON web token if you need authentication in your redirects. And this one line, that's it, one line, that's all you need to blanket proxy to another service via the redirects file.

If you need more power, proxy at the edge. This small snippet of code is all you need to do, and you can do redirects at the edge using this with a rewrite. And finally, with our new updated functions API released V2 last week, anybody see that? Go read the blog post. It allows you to specify endpoints in code rather than via redirects, and so it's configuration and code. There's a lot of power and flexibility in how you can incrementally move over to Netlify with these tools.

Okay, right, that's good. Great. But what about compliance? Cost. You know, these things that the legal team worries about. I get it. Compliance is important for your business. It's the precursor to many deals. And in Europe, especially, with even individuals wanting to use your site or app, using anything extra is a risk. We understand that, but Netlify makes this easy.

We're ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 certified, and we actively monitor for best practices. We have Enterprise Team Management, because you want to ensure that only those who you want to give access to and revoke when needed have access to the Netlify account and sites. We've not only got Single Sign-On (SSO) but also SAML SSO using your identity provider, so we work with what you already have, and that gives you access control at the team or organizational level, and you can manage centrally in that one place. You can even enforce SSO depending on your policies.

And we're also making available identity provider directory sync, SCIM for those in the know, to further streamline this workflow. And that brings site-level access control. I mean, for those super-secret branding campaign sites, that's probably quite important.

Log drains. Now, this may not sound super exciting. It's very, very powerful, and it is something that you need. It's not only great for compliance but also for your developer and SRE teams. It enables you to have advanced observability and debugging workflows. I mean, who doesn't want those? I certainly do. When my teams encounter problems, I expect them to be able to self-solve.

From a compliance perspective, the use of log drains allows all your logs to be joined up regardless of which system they come from. You can then have monitoring and alerting and even auditing going on in a central place. And your existing processes will just continue to work.

Okay, good. Next step. I know developers. Yes, I was one kind of. I'm one. Am I allowed to call myself a developer yet? No? Okay. They like to be challenged. They like learning new tools and techniques. And at Netlify, we can solve for their preference and your business goals. We believe our tools are pretty decent. We take great pride in our developer experience, and in adopting Netlify, we don't stop your developers using whatever the hot new thing is.

And even better for you is that through our ecosystem, we don't even lock you in. And Netlify functions, did I already mention we released V2 last week, allows for service-side code to be deployed as well as frontend code, and you can build complex applications. We don't limit your developers or their solution space, which makes them happy and allows your business to have the best solution that you need.

You can run our entire platform from your terminal. We're just doing that here in this little video: build, test, debug your app or site locally. That's what's happening here. Share your work live. We mentioned that at the start. Build and deploy from the command line. All of this is useful for individual developers, but it's also useful for local scripting, auditing, and compliance.

That's how quickly you can create a site just like that. And the SDK released last month adds even more. You can create unique digital experiences and link anything you would like to Netlify. You can build integrations with ease. You can customize processes and functions during deploy, runtime, build time, and you can even bring data into Netlify Connect that we mentioned earlier this summer. You can build, scale, and automate your way on your timeline.

As I already mentioned, we have the capability to have integrations to pull down data from any and all services that you rely on to create your complete website. You might want to pull e-commerce data in or personalize at the edge or reach out to a custom database that you have. We want to support all of these tools and already support a wide variety of external tools, bringing the best [in class] together. Each business division can use the tools they prefer, and we can help you pull things together. And in this way, we can meet your business where you are using your tools, your systems, and the things your developers want to use. We want to be supportive rather than disruptive in helping you achieve your goals.

Okay, you're sold. Excellent. Sales team will be speaking to you all at the end. But what if you have a larger team or unique needs? Well, we've got even more for you, and I'd love to bring Jennifer to the stage to share these details.

Build anything with Netlify Connect

Jennifer Arguello

Thank you, Claire. Let's give her a little round of applause again. So, how impressive was that? So exciting to be part of a team that's working on these solutions to help our customers deliver amazing digital experiences to their customers. Hi there, my name is Jennifer Arguello. I'm a Senior Product Manager at Netlify, and I'm thrilled to be here today to share even more of the Netlify vision with you and how we are helping businesses of all sizes go composable.

The next piece of the Netlify Composable Web Platform that I'm going to share with you today is Netlify Connect. You may already be familiar with Netlify Connect because we announced it earlier this year, but we have even more exciting announcements to show off and how we're helping our clients unlock the benefits of the composable web. Netlify Connect, if you didn't know, is a data unification layer powered by a GraphQL API that gives enterprises the freedom to unify all their data sources and modernize web architectures how they want at their own speed.

Traditional architectures, it's a tale as old as time. Companies start with maybe one data source, but as their applications evolve over time, solutions start entering into your architecture, and things get even more complicated for these systems because the tribal knowledge ebbs and flows within your company. Having a data source in your architecture is just one part of the problem because you need to be able to get it into your application code. This can complicate things because a lot of times, a data source can have its own API, its own documentation, and its own version control, and all of this requires oversight and management by the developers who are working on this, and it takes away some of your most valuable resource, and what's that? Your time. I'd say sanity is the close second to that, a valuable resource.

So, without a unifying data layer, companies are forced to pay more for hosting and operating these disparate data sources. You need something to connect these pieces together, and Netlify Connect is a content orchestration system that fetches all the necessary data from a source, caches it in a high-performance database, and provides one single unified API for data access. So, now that I've talked about traditional architectures, let's take a look at Netlify Connect.

Welcome to Netlify Connect, a data unification layer that improves website and app performance by connecting all data sources, hosting all content at the edge, and delivering best in class digital experiences. Connect unlocks the benefits of modern web architecture by connecting to all your existing content sources and giving enterprises the freedom to migrate and update their web stacks their way. Let's see how it works.

First, you can easily access the Connect UI from the sidebar in your Netlify dashboard. Next is creating a new data layer and syncing the first of your content sources. As you can see, it's quick and easy to select from multiple content sources to connect and begin syncing all data from that source to Netlify Connect.

Connect also allows you to link Netlify sites or external webhooks to your data layer. So, whenever Connect updates, the sites that depend on that data can fetch it and rebuild if needed. It's worth noting that while the very first time you set up a Connect API, it will take a few minutes to provision all the needed resources. Subsequent changes to your CMS data will be fetched and updated incrementally, making the time between publish and live on the web shrink to seconds.

Once data is synced, we can write our first query in the GraphQL sandbox for our data layer by selecting fields we want to query from our various content types. Our Contentful space from step one has a Thing content type with some entries, so let's select that type and query the title and slug fields. We can then test our query by clicking the play icon to see our CMS data being returned by Connect.

Once we know we have the data we want, we can copy and paste the query directly from the sandbox into our frontend code's GraphQL client. To make sure Connect always has the most up-to-date content from your sources, we expose a webhook that can be copied and pasted into each source's publishing workflows, ensuring Connect knows when content has changed and can update accordingly.

If your CMS allows it, we'll automatically add the proper webhook and content workflow to ensure Connect is always up-to-date [with your data]. With your data layer spun up, you're off to the races. Netlify Connect caches all content from your sources in a consistent, always available GraphQL API that can be used across all your different frontends.

By creating multiple data layers and content delivery redundancy, Netlify Connect gives you the freedom to begin migrating pieces or components of your existing tech stack to a modern, flexible architecture, in any way you choose. Also, all content hosted on Netlify High-Performance Edge is available for immediate recall globally, helping you scale all your web properties across all regions and languages simultaneously. This is the future of the modern web. Migrate and update your web your way to create a scalable, agile web stack. Netlify Connect is the answer to transforming from restrictive legacy architecture to a future that empowers all enterprises to build and launch websites and campaigns faster, increase online conversion and revenue, while reducing costs and mitigating risk. Get in touch at Netlify.com and see Netlify Connect in action.

Jennifer Arguello

So, how cool was that? Within a few minutes, we were able to create a data layer, connect our data source, create a webhook, and then push all that data to a frontend website. It's simple, it's easy, it's intuitive.

Today, I'm going to take you on a journey with me. I'm going to tell you the story of one company that came to Netlify looking for help. They were struggling with far too many content sources powering a large number of websites around the world, and their development team was struggling. They couldn't even make the smallest of changes. Their workflow was a hot mess, and their resources were very much constrained. So, they needed a solution. They needed it fast. They needed it yesterday. And they had done their research. They had learned about the composable web. They employed even some of the smartest engineers from around the world. Yet, they still realized that they desperately needed to modernize and simplify their current architecture so that they could meet the needs of their users today in 2023.

To give you a little more detail, this company had 20 data sources that were powering 250 sites around the world. The majority of these data sources were coming from multiple legacy CMS systems with many custom solutions that had accumulated years of updates and changes, which resulted in a very complex web. The business needed a way to start migrating pieces of the web architecture in a thoughtful way, in a way that would match their budget and available resources and allow them to be fast because some of these data sources were going to be end-of-lifed. And, as luck would have it, when they asked if Netlify could help, you know what we said? "Hell yeah, let's go!"

So, we got on task, and while we didn't have all the out-of-the-box integrations that they needed for all their 20 data sources, we were able to work side by side with their web team and help them create a plan to help them aggregate all the data sources so they could go composable. So, enter Netlify Connect.

By collaborating together and bringing what we had out of the box, we were able to get started. And then we realized we had a lot more work to do to get the rest of the 20 data sources aggregated together. Some of these data sources were Microsoft Excel, AWS S3 buckets, and their homegrown CMSes. So, what's been going on over the past few months? We've made incredible progress, and this company is now on a solid pathway to achieving their goal.

How did we do this? Today, their Netlify Connect is running in production with Drupal and Contentful, all aggregated together, and the teams are working collaboratively to build the next set of custom integrations, leveraging the Netlify SDK that Claire had mentioned a little bit ago. And we've not only been able to help this organization make giant leaps toward going composable, but also, in this project, we've been building Netlify Connect integrations to help them unify all 20 data sources. So, they've not been stuck at any point.

Also, it's been incredible that this collaboration and dedication to make composable a reality was not only something that would benefit just this customer, but it would help incredibly benefit our Netlify partners and our internal Netlify teams. Sounds like a win-win to me, and it's been an amazing example of teamwork working together to achieve one common goal. And until today, this hadn't been possible.

We're helping customers with their homegrown data sources get into 2024 and beyond with all the leading CMS providers who are also helping drive the transformation to the composable web. I mentioned ease before, and that was brought on because we have some out-of-the-box connectors that we've shipped. Here you see Shopify, Contentful, WordPress, and Drupal. And it's my pleasure, and I'm excited to announce that today we've added Sanity, Contentstack, Storyblok, and Agility to our out-of-the-box Netlify Connect integrations.

They are available for all our customers that are part of Netlify using Netlify Connect, and the technology that powers these integrations is the Netlify SDK. Speaking of the SDK, if you missed the launch last month, it is the next step in enterprise development to streamline the process of customizing concepts, going from idea to live production at a quick and scalable pace. If a Netlify product doesn't support your needs out of the box, new integrations can be built with the Netlify SDK. It standardizes and streamlines your end users' experience with integrations and the developer experience for building them. By using the Netlify SDK, shipping times are sped up tremendously by not having to start from scratch.

With the power of the SDK, here are some examples of what you can do. You can run custom logic that fits your needs. You can build customized UI that goes right into the Netlify app. And then you can build connectors, which are those Netlify Connect integrations that I talked about. It's one SDK to extend many facets of your application. As the next evolution of the Netlify SDK, I am thrilled to announce that now we're giving all Netlify customers the ability to build private integrations, which puts the power back into the hands of the developers to create their own integrations not just on Netlify Connect but on all of [the] Netlify Composable Web Platform. I can't wait to see.

Yes, I can't wait to see what you all come up with. These innovations are helping businesses chart a path to composable that did not exist before. Great. So with the addition of private integrations, you might be asking, what are some of the use cases here? Well, you can enforce security requirements in your pre-production environments so that they match your production environments. You can build and share secrets and have it in one centralized place.

If your sites are not working properly, you can build an integration that would upload source maps to your vendors so you can help debug what's going on, and this can vastly reduce the support time to fix these defects. Thank you so much for allowing me the time to share one story of how we helped a customer on their journey to composable using Netlify Connect. But the fun doesn't stop here, just my storytelling. But we're only part way there.

So, without further ado, I'm honored to bring up Dan Barak to tell you more about exciting news here at Netlify today.

Create Business Impact with Netlify Create

Dan Barak

Hey folks! Okay, so thank you, Jennifer and Claire, for showing us all the wonderful tools that we have for our architects and developers to actually get such performant websites and all the goodness of Netlify. Now, I want to talk to you about what you care about, which is business impact and how to create that business impact. My name is Dan Barak; I'm the GM of Emerging Products at Netlify, and I'm the former co-founder and CEO of Stackbit. I'm here today to announce that Stackbit is now Netlify Create!

So, Netlify has acquired Stackbit to fulfill our joint vision of bringing composable web architecture to everyone and making it accessible by helping all the constituents in an organization work together but separately. So, what is "Create"? Create is a unified contextual visual editor that allows product managers, marketers, content ops people, and everybody to make changes right on your website. They can click and move things around without being dependent on developers and have a modern UI experience like everybody expects. The beauty of this is you don't have to compromise at all; it's not a site builder that locks you in. It works with any content source, tech stack, or backend.

You can build the digital experiences you want and need with agility, and it will help your business move fast and move forward. Then you can hand this over, and everybody can edit this really simply in a magical way. Fear not, this is not somewhere that you can just drag things around and everybody would create their own stuff with no governance or checks and balances. You are designing the editing experience that your company will have. Brand guidelines will be followed, and all the workflows you have in place are still there. We're working really closely with all the backends and all the content sources to make sure all the validations rules are there and nobody can go rogue. This provides guardrails for everyone, and everyone can be content working independently but also collaborating better together.

I think everybody in this room has acknowledged that gradual migrations are a great idea. The problem is like 9 months of migrations that you have to go through. Nobody can touch the old system, nobody can touch the new system. It's hard to make that leap. By having one UI through which you edit that never changes and allows you to swap out the components, you don't have to re-train your marketing team. It doesn't matter where things are stored. Your developers and architects will take care of that. But then you just want to make a change, you want to ship something that will make an impact, announce a new partnership, or react to events. All of that is right at your fingertips.

To recap, we have Connect and Core that are helping your architects build the digital experiences that you want with all the bells and whistles. Then, you can hand them over to your marketing team, and they can use Create to build pages, applications, and new websites with a no-code experience in an environment that they find intuitive and easy to use.

Now, it's demo time. I will walk through something that's very timely, getting ready for Black Friday. We will update an e-commerce website and show how these changes are made. This demo is built with all the goodness of the full composable web platform. Data is sourced from multiple sources through Connect, edited in Create, and deployed with Core. I encourage you all to visit our booth where you can dig deep, see how things are built, and get more demos.

Let’s get started. What we're seeing right here is the Create UI on the top and on the left, and I'm going to start making changes. I can simply click in and I'll notice that this content is coming specifically from Contentful. Now I don't have to go into Contentful, on the page I can change “Fall” to “Winter” because clearly it's winter outside right now. It's also probably not the right time to explore, we want to buy now because it's Black Friday.

So we're going to make these changes on the fly. Now I'm going to go to my products page and notice that the products are actually coming in from Shopify. In this case if I want to add a new product to this list, I can have the entire list come in straight from my product catalog. I can see where items appear already on the website and make all these changes. If this title doesn't suit me, I can even edit it here. By the way, it doesn't mean I cannot edit it in the content source. This preview will reflect everything.

There was one more thing, I thought I saw a typo somewhere. On this about page there is a typo there. This should be 1860, [not 1868.] One thing to notice is this content source hasn’t migrated yet, so it's coming in from Drupal. Maybe I want to keep it there, and I can still make the same changes in the same way in the same UI. I don't really care as a marketer where the content resides.

Okay, back to the main page, I want to add a little bit of content. I will essentially go down and say I want a new section. I'm going to create one and all of these options are the same code component with different content presets set in them. So I'll select one, and it's added in place. What happens is we're going back to the content source, creating all the objects there, and then seeing the preview rendered. I want to make some modifications, I'll add an image to this section. I think it makes a better quote to see somebody's face. And now that the faces and names are not aligned, I’m going to move it to the bottom. Again, everything you would expect from a consumer-grade site builder. And it’s really easy for me to make these changes in place.

Another thing that I want to change a little bit is this brown to something darker for winter. You'll notice that in this case, I'm actually changing the color and I'm free to do so because that's what the developers and designers have decided. Usually, I will pick from brand colors and not have the freedom to do whatever I want. Now here's the kicker, I will reuse this so I will save this as a template or a preset. This snapshots not just the visual appearance but all the underlying structure, all the content that is there. It will save it for me in effect allowing me to build my own component library as a marketer. Yes, sometimes I will probably need other changes like an image in the background and what not. Then I can go to my developer and ask for the type of work they enjoy doing.

Let's switch to mobile for a second. This is not just a mobile preview, you can actually work here in this mobile environment. This can also be configured to whatever viewport you want. Here I see there's no break between the two bright, light sections, so I'll drag, drop, and move this new section around and put it in here. You see, it's a working environment. Now this looks better.

Essentially at this point, I can add a lot of other constituents who have their own permissions and share my changes with them. There's a QR code that you can scan for anyone to see the updates live on your phone. Then I'll select what to publish. Now obviously it's Black Friday, I don't want to wake up at midnight so I will schedule the publish. As I schedule this, all the different content sources will sync together and will be launched all at once in a synchronized way with your CI/CD pipeline and your processes. That's it, we're done. We've seen how this works, and now we have a brand new website that's ready to go.

Now that you've seen what Netlify Create is, I want you to imagine how easy this is because I’ve seen this live in demos, customers making their first change and it’s amazing to see. All of a sudden you can make a change in minutes, and you don't have to go into a ticket vortex and be like, “Oh I need to submit a ticket now to my development team.” That development team is working on more important things, and you're ticket is going to get deprioritized. It's going to take 7 days. and you're just gonna give up. Or you're not even gonna start sometimes and that's a shame, because business impact means you have to react in real time. Fast time to market means not just a fast deploy, but being able to actually make that change from the inception of your idea live. So we're decreasing the coupling between these cross functional teams and making them work together better.

Now I haven't shown you this, but having that one interface is not all about the content that goes into your website. It's also the content that essentially you need to make informed decisions. For example, analytics. Why would I go back and forth to Google Analytics or to whatever provider to understand what's happening? I’m already in my editing interface, I want to learn everything that needs to go into my decision-making process right there. So you can surface analytics, you can surface dashboards internally. The UI is completely customizable. Not only does it work with all the content sources, all the backends, and all of them together, but also you can customize everything — what are the editing options that you have, etc. If you want to see personalization or A/B tests, you don't have to open incognito windows and hope that you're going to get all the variants. You can see the experience there and make changes.

So the best part, or I don't know if it's the best part, but a really good part is that the integration is seamless. We are very much a huge believer in the truly composable web. That means no vendor lock-in. One config file that specifies your content sources, API keys, and spaces is enough to get you started and that's it. You don't have to register components, write them in any specific way, or do any kind of magic to make this work. Not only are these connectors available off the shelf, you can create your custom ones. We've had plenty of customers that are building on this open interface. Our editor knows how to work with it to deliver essentially data from and to any content source.

With that, this is the stack and the platform that now works together and ties everything together — all the constituents and stakeholders in the organization. It comes from the decision-making of the architects in how to build the architecture, from the developers who are building the components and deciding how to ship and deploy it with their processes, to the business people who are now able to continuously take this and drive impact whether it’s sales, leads, or brand awareness and just get it done. With that I'll hand it back to Matt to wrap us up, thank you!

Netlify Composable Web Platform

Matt Biilmann

Thanks, Dan, Jennifer, and Claire. That was amazing! I'm incredibly excited to show you what we've been hard at work on, and it's just the beginning. Initially, when we came up with the concept of Netlify, it was about finding a better architecture for the web. We wanted to enable web teams to adopt this new way of building web architecture. We created Netlify Core, the core frontend cloud, and it has become a market standard, fundamentally changing how people build for the web today. Now, we're looking at how large companies can adapt their core web architecture to this modern way of building. We've considered the needs of developers, architects, marketers, and business stakeholders who are all involved in making this transition successful. The composable platform for the web that we showed today is our response to these challenges, and we believe it will bring about a shift in how the web is built, similar to what Netlify Core did 8 years ago. If you're interested in learning more, please visit our booth where our engineers are ready to provide demos and go into greater detail. You can also find us around the conference. Now, I'd like to leave you with a video that summarizes all of this and introduces the Netlify Composable Web Platform.

Netlify Composable Web Platform Demo Video

Introducing the Netlify Composable Web Platform, a modern solution that helps companies of all sizes adopt a composable approach to web architecture, increasing speed to innovation. Imagine having the freedom to build and scale your web and digital experiences the way you want. For the first time, there's a path to update and migrate your web stacks to composable architectures strategically, incrementally, and modularly. Netlify offers a web development platform that streamlines orchestration across your web stack, accelerating speed to innovation for all teams. With Netlify, companies can build and implement composable architectures to launch experiences faster, be more productive, and drive higher conversions and revenue while reducing risk and complexity.

Gone are the days when your best developers are locked in a never-ending cycle, choosing between critical updates to maintain legacy systems or supporting the growing demands of product and marketing teams. Teams are often asked to do more with less, and increasing the speed of innovation across the business is crucial to keep online revenue and leads coming in. Enter Netlify, the composable web platform. We offer 3 unique solutions to help companies transform their existing architectures into agile, efficient workflows, seamlessly integrated and protected by enterprise-grade security.

Netlify Connect unifies all of your content into a single data layer, serving any frontend website or application. Netlify Core simplifies web development into a single workflow to build, test, and deploy digital experiences faster than ever before. Netlify Create increases productivity across teams with frontend visual editing, offering real-time updates by anyone who can click, edit, and publish. The combination of these 3 solutions provides the foundation for companies to introduce composable architectures to any new or existing tech stack, delivering business outcomes that increase speed and productivity for all teams.

If you're looking to give your teams and organization the freedom to move faster and achieve your business goals, Netlify is the answer. Get in touch with sales at netlify.com and see the Netlify Composable Web Platform in action.