Dynamic Content Delivery at Scale with a Decoupled CMS

Whether a quickly growing startup or an established global enterprise, you need the ability to scale digital content experiences to meet customer needs. Seamless, personalized experiences across every touchpoint are in demand, whether customers visit on a desktop, browse on mobile, interact with voice assistants, or engage on social media. 

However, meeting those requirements can be difficult when relying on traditional CMSs and even most headless CMSs, as they can struggle with the complexities of dynamic content delivery. 

In this article, we’ll explain how you can accomplish dynamic content at scale with a decoupled CMS. 

What Is Dynamic Content?

Dynamic content is any digital content that automatically changes depending on the preferences or behaviors of the person interacting. It is essentially personalized content on websites that is adjusted in real-time to create a more engaging experience for customers. This differs from static content, which remains the same no matter who is viewing the website. 

For example, when you visit an eCommerce website after shopping with them, the content might be altered based on your purchase history, whereas someone visiting the website for the first time will probably see something different. Dynamic content can also be found on news or social media websites that update as new content is posted, or localized websites from global brands that change based on geographical location. 

Why Scaling Dynamic Content Matters for Enterprises

Website scaling involves adapting your infrastructure to handle increased workloads effectively. These workloads might include a surge in users, a high volume of simultaneous transactions, or any demand that exceeds the software’s initial capacity.

Most CMSs can provide dynamic content to customers to personalize the browsing experience. However, for enterprises, the ability to scale that content to multiple customers and across channels is a key focus area. 

• More Data, More Problems: Enterprises are collecting more customer data every day, which means that the ability to produce dynamic content grows exponentially. Leveraging this data effectively by delivering the right message at the right time requires a scalable solution to process, interpret, and act on vast datasets without delay.
• Complex Multichannel Journeys: The customer journey isn’t linear, and today’s customers don’t interact on a single channel, which forces enterprises to adapt in real time to user behavior and context.  
• Customers Expectations: No matter the customer, no matter the touchpoint, customers generally won’t accept a one-size-fits-all content approach. Brands like Netflix and Amazon have spoiled customers with personalized experiences, and businesses need the ability to scale dynamic content to deliver something similar. 

Challenges in Scaling Dynamic Content with a Traditional CMS

Businesses that want to deliver personalized, real-time content experiences will look to their CMS to meet their needs. Unfortunately, many struggle, particularly with traditional CMSs like Drupal, Adobe AEM, Magnolia, and even newer systems such as Contentstack and Contentful. Although you can launch websites with solutions like these, issues can arise as you start to scale. 

Infrastructure Issues

Traditional CMS platforms typically rely on monolithic architectures that are not built for the demands of high-traffic websites. These infrastructure issues can lead to performance bottlenecks that can slow loading and downtime, complete overhauls required to scale to global audiences, and a drain on resources. 

Content Inconsistencies

Drupal and other traditional CMSs aren’t built for today’s omnichannel world. As a result, brands might suffer from inconsistent experiences as customers toggle between channels, including incorrect messaging or outdated content, which can cause customers to lose trust. 

Latency Problems

Fast loading times and instant responses have become routine for many customers today. Unfortunately, traditional CMSs can struggle with latency issues due to database-driven architecture and overreliance on content delivery networks (CDNs) - that are built to deliver static content only. 

Database Centric

Traditional CMSs are built around a database (SQL or NoSQL, it doesn’t matter) for both content authoring/management, as well as content delivery. Scaling databases involves complexity, performance issues, security vulnerabilities, and more.

What Do You Need to Scale Dynamic Content?

Enterprises that want to scale dynamic content must first focus on adopting a CMS with the right foundation and infrastructure. Here are some of the things necessary for scaling a dynamic website:

Stateless Content Delivery

When software is built to store state on a server, and data/content in a database, all related requests must be directed to that specific server. This setup prevents load balancers from distributing work across available servers, limiting scalability. While caching state is essential for performance, it can hinder horizontal scaling if not managed effectively.

To overcome these limitations, modern applications are adopting stateless designs and embracing serverless architectures. In this model, no state is stored, allowing the application to run seamlessly on serverless services without developers needing to understand the underlying architecture. This approach ensures both scalability and elasticity. 

From a CMS perspective, this means you need a decoupled architecture, where content authoring is decoupled and separate from content delivery, and where the content delivery system is stateless.

Microservices Architecture

Traditional monolithic applications are resource-intensive and slow to deploy. In contrast, microservices enable targeted scaling, allowing you to allocate additional processing power only to the parts of the system that need it. While adopting microservices introduces more complexity, the benefits include improved resource efficiency and simpler implementation of elastic processes.

No Database

Traditional databases, whether SQL or NoSQL, are widely used for all CMS developers, making them an easy choice for data/content storage. However, scaling these databases with full data replication can be problematic, as write operations often become a bottleneck. Instead, architectures that bypass traditional databases in favor of distributed repositories offer a more scalable solution.

Reduced Latency

To achieve software scalability, it’s crucial to handle resource-intensive tasks near the users. Horizontal scaling, for instance, can introduce high latency when systems in different geographic locations communicate, creating bottlenecks. 

One solution to this challenge is edge computing. By positioning computing power closer to users, edge computing reduces server communication time and alleviates traffic on core system resources. This approach effectively minimizes latency and eliminates communication bottlenecks.

Achieving Global Content Delivery with CrafterCMS

Enterprises that want to achieve global content delivery need the infrastructure to scale dynamic content. 

CrafterCMS is an enterprise-grade headless CMS for large-scale, high-performance, and ultra-secure sites and apps. It provides the modern architecture that allows organizations to scale their content delivery needs and the features to manage their content effectively. Here’s how:

• Decoupled Architecture: CrafterCMS is an enterprise decoupled CMS designed to separate content authoring from content delivery. Unlike some headless CMSs that market themselves as decoupled, a truly enterprise-grade decoupled CMS ensures distinct authoring and delivery environments. CrafterCMS goes beyond merely separating the frontend UI from the backend; it also isolates the content authoring system from the content delivery systems, providing robust enterprise-level flexibility and scalability.
• Elastic Scalability: CrafterCMS provides a scalable, globally distributed infrastructure powered by an in-memory database and OpenSearch. With integrated container orchestration and Kubernetes support, it equips global enterprises with elastic scalability, enabling rapid deployment of new servers worldwide for efficient content delivery.
• Serverless and Stateless: CrafterCMS’s content delivery system features a serverless architecture, supporting high-performance, secure, and scalable content delivery to your sites/app and, by extension, your global audience.
• Pre-rendered Content: CrafterCMS can store pre-rendered content in memory and can serve content from memory with no external database requirement, allowing you to personalize responses based on usage. 
• Enterprise-grade Security: CrafterCMS follows rigorous security protocols, performing regular audits and vulnerability assessments to address and mitigate leading security threats. It also offers single-sign-on (SSO) and permissions to ensure only authorized people can access content. 
• Cloud-Friendly CMS: CrafterCMS is a cloud native platform, and as a self-hosted/self-managed option allows you to deploy on any public cloud. In addition, Crafter Cloud is a private AWS CMS solution that leverages AWS services including EC2, S3, Opensearch, Cloudfront, and EKS which support dynamic content delivery. 

Do you need global content delivery on a modern, dynamic CMS? Try CrafterCMS today.