Crafter Cloud: A Headless CMS and Developer PaaS

A Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is exactly what it sounds like: a digital platform for developers to build upon, ready for action out-of-the-box. A CMS PaaS offers a pre-built platform for developers to develop and deploy software and content-driven applications without having to build and manage their own underlying infrastructure. 

Naturally, this saves time and costs for companies seeking to innovate and iterate quickly with their digital experiences. 

With Crafter Cloud, we’ve brought together a PaaS with a headless CMS, perfect for ambitious brands with forward-thinking DevOps teams.

What is Crafter Cloud?

Crafter Cloud is a leading headless CMS, a content authoring SaaS, and enterprise developer PaaS, all at the same time. From a marketer’s perspective, it’s the ultimate user-friendly SaaS CMS for creating content and customer experiences, and from a developer’s perspective, Crafter Cloud is a PaaS that’s poised for supporting rapid innovation.

Today, brands need a CMS that blends and harmonizes with their DevOps tools and processes, helping them to build and iterate omnichannel experiences and scale them elastically. That’s Crafter Cloud, which offers benefits including:

• Develop and Deploy any Digital Experience: From websites to mobile apps to digital signage to augmented reality, you can benefit from Crafter Cloud’s user-friendly tooling to build and manage any content-rich application.
• Git-based Collaboration: Enjoy a superior DevOps experience thanks to Crafter Cloud’s Git-based repository.
• Enjoy the Benefits of Cloud Infrastructure and SaaS: Crafter Cloud is a fully managed CMS that is elastically scalable, giving you world class infrastructure that doesn’t need your ongoing maintenance. Plus, CrafterCMS is the headless CMS trusted by a range of enterprise companies, like Penn Mutual and Marriott, for its content APIs and user-friendliness, even from a marketer’s perspective.
• Cloud Freedom: Want to host CrafterCMS in a private cloud, or deploy it in alignment with your hybrid cloud strategy? No problem.

Learn more about what you can do with Crafter Cloud.

Crafter Cloud: Under The Hood

Crafter Cloud uses the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS) along with Amazon EKS as the orchestration layer. Alternatively, Crafter Cloud can be managed in a private cloud, or in a hybrid cloud scenario.

Other AWS products are also leveraged, including Amazon EC2, S3, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, and Amazon CloudFront to ensure rapid content delivery worldwide.

Crafter builds and manages the Kubernetes configuration and deployment files, which provide a recipe for Amazon EKS, instructing it on what needs to be done, and to facilitate deployment of CrafterCMS.

Thanks to the content delivery side of your CrafterCMS sites and apps being serverless and stateless, combining it with Amazon EKS makes them infinitely and elastically scalable so you can serve all types of traffic, at any time, across the globe.

Learn more about Crafter Cloud’s Infrastructure.

Crafter Cloud: Genuine Developer Freedom

So, what makes Crafter Cloud the ideal canvas for a developer’s technical creativity?

The ability to write server-side code and APIs on Crafter Cloud is a great place to start. Other headless content management systems rely on third-party services to do server side coding, while Crafter does it natively. This unique feature is a game changer for DevOps practitioners wanting to leverage a headless CMS.

Developers who want to do interesting and innovative things want and need control over APIs, they want to be able to build their own APIs, too. That’s precisely the kind of developer that Crafter Cloud caters to.

Developers can build APIs via Crafter Cloud. In fact, we think it’s the ideal environment to build APIs, as it was designed to be the API-driven backend for any experience you want to build.

A Truly Different Headless CMS

Crafter Cloud is a headless CMS that is provisioned as a PaaS. This distinguishes us from all other headless platforms, as we’re a content API in the cloud plus a development platform.

What does this mean in practice? Well, if you’re using a simple headless CMS like Contentful, and you’re leveraging Nodejs for server-side rendering, you have to host that Node server somewhere else. This is not the case with Crafter Cloud, it’s all hosted natively.

From a performance perspective, Crafter Cloud can provide a single API call to all backend services, enabling you to integrate with services like:

• Marketing automation systems and email marketing platforms
• CRMs (Customer Relationship Management system) to leverage customer data
• PIM (Product Information Management system) content to support eCommerce catalogs and headless commerce projects.

With other headless platforms, you need to call content from the browser to the content API, execute another call to your commerce system, another to a CRM, and yet another to a PIM. Crafter via its REST and GraphQL APIs can do all this on the backend, and all with a single call. This all means you’ll get a high performance front end experience, because it's a single, consolidated API call executed on the server compared to multiple calls on the client.

Furthermore, Crafter Cloud’s architecture is perfect for cutting edge applications and experiences, because it keeps all the logic in one place, which is better for an omnichannel environment, and better for long term maintenance of your code.

It’s for these reasons enterprises like MasterCard, BNY Mellon, and Pokemon trust Crafter Cloud to power their websites, intranets, OTT video, and other digital experiences.

Last but not least, a large part of Crafter Cloud’s developer freedom comes via the marketer-friendliness of Crafter Studio, the content authoring platform. In Crafter Cloud, Studio is provisioned as a SaaS, catering to marketers who just want to author and iterate content quickly, and not have to deal with code or having to request developer support for anything. Crafter Studio offers features like WYSIWYG in-context editing, drag and drop experience building, auditing, version history, content dependencies, workflow, scheduled publishing and much more.

Learn more about Crafter Cloud or contact us to start a free trial today.