What is an AWS CMS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most widely used cloud platform globally, and AWS has the market share to prove it. As of Q3 2020, the global cloud market grew to $36.5B with AWS holding 32% of that market share, according to analytics firm Canalys.

The benefits of AWS go beyond cloud computing services, and organizations can leverage AWS to deploy content-rich web applications powered by CMS. In this article, we’ll dive into AWS, provide an overview of some of its key cloud services, and explain how an AWS CMS works and its use cases.

What is AWS?

AWS provides a highly reliable and scalable platform for cloud computing that companies and individuals can use to power their infrastructure and software applications. With a global reach, AWS provides the agility and elasticity that enables brands to innovate and remain agile so that they can adjust to meet growth and demand.

Access to on-demand delivery of various cloud services is available across several regions and availability zones that are connected through a low latency, high throughput network. This ensures that enterprises can benefit from the several services offered by AWS.

Key AWS Services

AWS’ broad array of services enables the platform to provide several products and services. Some of the ones most relevant to an content-rich web applications include:

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud, enabling companies to increase or decrease their capacity and scale their services and applications as required.

Amazon S3

An object storage service used to store and protect data no matter the use case. With S3, enterprises can store data for a host of applications.

Amazon EKS

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provides the flexibility to start, maintain and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud. It provides highly available and secure clusters which make it easier to run serverless applications on AWS.

Amazon AI/ML

AWS provides machine learning services that enable developers and data scientists to add artificial intelligence to applications, such as object recognition within images and videos, speech recognition, recommendations for personalized experiences, and more.

Amazon Elasticsearch

Amazon Elasticsearch enables the deployment of an Elasticsearch cluster quickly, which delivers high powered search for both content authoring and content delivery (e.g, to enable browsing and search within your content applications).

Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito provides authentication and authorization services that allow you to add user sign-up / sign-in, control access to web applications, and personalized experiences.

AWS Elemental Media Services

Elemental Media Services is the sector of AWS that specializes in video workloads. AWS Media Services consists of services -- such as MedialLive, MediaPackage, and MediaConnect -- that provide the tools to deliver both live streaming and video-on-demand (VOD) applications to your audience.

Amazon CloudFront

AWS’ content delivery network service delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers worldwide. It provides fast content delivery and advanced security.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda allows you to run code without worrying about provisioning or managing servers. As a serverless computing platform, it enables code to run virtually for any type of application or backend service.

Each of these services can benefit an AWS CMS, but to leverage these components effectively, there are a few specific requirements.

Requirements for an AWS CMS

Cloud-Native

For a CMS to work with AWS, it needs to be cloud-native; in other words, built from the ground up for cloud deployments. Cloud-native software relies on microservices architecture and supports containerization. This enables the CMS to meet the demands made of the current modern environment. For content delivery, elastic scalability is crucially importantl and to fully support this an AWS-friendly CMS should be stateless.

Stateless & Serverless

A stateless architecture enables separate instances of applications to operate independently. This allows content services to be deployed without any need for complicated synchronization schemes or shared resources. Stateless and serverless architectures can be deployed and managed with minimal IT operational requirements, most if not all of which can be automated.

Read More: How Crafter Cloud Works With AWS For Serverless Content Delivery

Elastic Scalability

An AWS CMS needs to have an elastic architecture to maintain high performance on a global scale. CMS-powered applications that are elastic can dynamically utilize resources as needed based on traffic and other performance requirements.

Well-Integrated

An AWS CMS needs to have native integrations with AWS services, especially Amazon EC2, EKS, S3, Elasticsearch, CloudFront, Elemental Media Services, and the other services depending on the type of digital experience applications that are powered by the CMS. Many CMS’ can run on AWS, but the out-of-the-box integrations of an AWS CMS enable it to leverage these cloud services without additional development work and maintenance.

Read More: Crafter Cloud: A Fully Managed CMS On Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services

AWS CMS Use Cases

When AWS is combined with a modern CMS built to maximize the cloud’s potential, then many use cases can be achieved. An AWS CMS provides the technology infrastructure required to implement several digital innovations. Here are a few examples:

Personalized, Planet-Scale Enterprise Websites

Today’s modern websites feature minimalistic designs, but more importantly, they are created with the customer in mind. Personalized and responsive websites deliver better customer experiences.

Also, for larger enterprises, they can cater to visitors from all over the world and provide them with the most appropriate content for their particular region. Fast websites with a global reach are possible as a result a cloud-native CMS built for AWS.

Mobile Apps & Multichannel Experiences

Consumers today don’t merely rely on modern websites, and if they do, they may choose to access them via their mobile devices.

An AWS CMS will provide an API-first developer experience to support native-mobile app development and content delivery across many channels and devices. This enables companies to create multichannel experiences and meet customers wherever they are.

Live Video Experiences

Video content continues to grow in popularity, and the scalability, storage capacity and functionality available through AWS means that enterprises can create, store, process and distribute video content as desired.

An AWS CMS allows you to fully leverage the capabilities of AWS Media Services, including live streaming and VOD experiences. Video content management on AWS is the future of next gen video experiences.

CrafterCMS: Built to Leverage the Power of AWS

For the ideal CMS capable of leveraging the cloud and all that AWS has to offer, look no further than CrafterCMS. CrafterCMS has the user-friendly features you require to create and manage omnichannel experiences on a global scale, and the DevOps capabilities for building and deploying modern content-enabled applications in the elastic cloud.

CrafterCMS is a headless+ CMS that goes way beyond traditional legacy CMS platforms, and the simple headless-only CMS platforms. Crafter’s WYSIWYG editor and easy-to-use interface provide everything content authors require in a CMS.

Meanwhile, developers can count on CrafterCMS’s API-first, Git-based distributed repository to streamline development processes, and leverage its out-of-the-box integrations with AWS. CrafterCMS offers a cloud-native, microservices architecture and serverless and stateless content delivery system that enables elastic scalability. Crafter’s ability to leverage most of AWS’s features provide exactly what is required for an enterprise-level CMS.

Plus, CrafterCMS’s unique support for DevContentOps processes combines content authoring operations with DevOps to enhance how content-rich digital experiences are built and optimized for today’s modern digital landscape.

Want to learn more about how CrafterCMS integrates with AWS? Read our whitepaper on Choosing a CMS for Building Content-Driven Sites and Apps on AWS.