As headless CMS solutions increasingly take hold across organizations thanks to flexible, scalable options, learning how to maintain them via multi-environments becomes all the more important. Multi-environment workflows enable teams to reliably develop, test, stage, and deploy across various channels. This post teaches you how to create a multi-environment workflow with a headless CMS from content management strategies to deployment pipelines to team collaboration.
The Advantages of Having Multiple Environments to Work In
Having multiple environments to work in means a development environment, staging, and production, instead of working directly in production and having everything published live before it’s ready. Utilizing a headless CMS for scalable solutions can further enhance this workflow by ensuring consistent content management across these distinct environments. With multiple environments, changes can be vetted, tested, and finalized before they go public. This lessens the chances of broken features, bad information, or bad experiences being presented to users on a live web page immediately, as there’s time to make edits and ensure functionality instead of launching ideas as soon as they’re made.
The Intent of Each Environment and Where They Should NOT Be Used
The intent of each environment development, staging, production and that they only operate where they’re supposed to is critical to a multi-environment infrastructure. For example, development should be open to experiments and failures, while staging should be a copy of production but with the possibility of testing. Production should never be used as a place to test; it should maintain its current settings and remain a live option. Having clear places for everything doesn’t confuse the process and only enhances operational efficiency.
Consistent Content Models Across All Environments
All content models should be consistent across all environments. If content types are different (different fields, categories, metadata) across environments, it will create friction during deployment, and it will not ensure that everything functions correctly no matter its location from development to deployment. Therefore, this creates complications that could be avoided by ensuring that things are the same across environments, which would allow content migration and deployment to occur seamlessly, quickly, and without human error.
Automated Deployment Pipelines
Automation plays an important role when creating multi-environment workflows with a headless CMS. Automated deployment pipelines enable consistent movement of content and settings across environments while reducing manual labor and human error. When using CI/CD pipeline tools and automated deployment scripts, deployment for multi-environment consistency occurs more efficiently and effectively without the time-consuming risk of manually deploying the same thing over and over. Automated actions allow internal teams to receive their content and changes quicker, promoting effective and quick trial and error so that content can be confidently published without second-guessing.
Access Controls per Environment
When constructing workflows for multi-environment success, additional access can be useful provided it’s in accordance with the intention behind any given action. Access controls per environment allow for role-based permission so team members have access to do what they must within expected roles. For example, edits that are allowed in development should not be allowed in staging and production; merely the ability to see what’s going on should be instituted. Similarly, approvals and publishing may be ideal for specific teams and specific members. This powerful tool reduces risk, promotes accountability, and avenues for keeping content on track. Security and governance are greatly improved so an enterprise can manage all their resources with high efficiency.
Version Control for Content and Configuration
Version control is another important factor when managing multi-environment workflows with a headless CMS. The implementation of a version control repository for both content and configuration allows teams to see what changes were made when so that rollbacks can happen down the line if necessary. Additionally, a thorough understanding of the history of version changes provides insight, collaboration, and assessment throughout the development process before final deployment. Thus, it provides organization and reduces the potential for risk in complicated changes which increase reliability.
Using Environment Variables and Configuration Management.
Access to environment-specific tools and features through environment variables allows for a lot of flexibility in multi-environment workflows. Teams can set their own tools up or fail such as API endpoints, database connections, third-party integrations, etc. on specific environments. However, with a configuration variable, these efforts can easily be reverted back to default state. Reliance on configuration management tools, however, encourages best practices for similar application features/failures across environments and easier deployment. Being aware of environments provides another layer of separation efforts that allow for a more functionally stable operation.
Using Webhooks to Connect Environments with Immediate Impact.
Webhooks provide a successful connection of various integrations across environments that have immediate impact. A webhook can be triggered when content is pushed to production, resulting in many tools automatically deploying code, for example, notifying different environments/sites of new content or updating related content on different pieces of content on different sites/integrations as well. Creating this type of integration via webhooks reduces manual intervention and operational inefficiencies that could frustrate a team or its users. The more connected these efforts and timelines are, the more real-time opportunities exist.
Maintaining Environments with Regular Updates/Synchronization.
Updating or syncing regularly between environments helps reduce the chance for anomalies to occur. Whether syncing based on a scheduled time or a trigger from one environment replicated in another, regularly updating helps keep staging up to date with production and clarity in development efforts. The more environments are updated and synced over time, the less likelihood of workflow drift will occur improving content accuracy, testing, and overall functional stability.
Promoting Collaboration via Documented Processes
Documented processes help foster collaboration as they bring people in from different environments together and provide guidance for inter-environment operations. For instance, how to submit content, content review, deployment and rollback of deployments can truly serve to not only collaborate but avoid grey areas and unknowns. When people are aware of their contributions, what is expected in a process and how to effectively engage in a process within and in-between environments, productivity is maximized, content is better managed and operational inefficiencies are reduced significantly for more seamless and successful deployments.
Protecting Environments with Security and Compliance
Multi-environment efforts must focus on security and compliance all around. Whether it’s security passwords, authentication, data encryption standards or compliance protocols (GDPR), every environment must have its own security assessments, data access and data action considerations as well as preventative measures. This decreases the likelihood of breaches, reduces the chance of non-compliance and fosters a secure, reputable presence for organizations which shows that they take the right digital steps to protect consumer data.
Engaging in Holistic Monitoring and Analytics
Multiple environments require multilayered monitoring and analytics across the board. Organizations need to track error rates, success of deployments and API interaction to identify problems sooner than later. When using a headless CMS, garnering an aggregate score of the performance of the API is critical to success; knowing how well content was deployed or how often issues arise and when is crucial for remediation efforts. The fewer errors, the less downtime, the higher quality experience is for users and ensures that deployments across varying environments function properly.
Scaling and Flexibility for Future Needs
Whenever you architect multi-environment workflows with a headless CMS, you need to plan for scalability and flexibility for future needs. For example, creating stable environments and workflows that can be easily scaled in the future to accommodate more content, another digital channel, or even new integration points fosters ongoing effectiveness and efficiency. Additionally, flexible, modular workflows allow companies to easily adopt new workflows as they learn more about the market or if newer technologies come out, keeping them one step ahead of the competition and appropriately responsive to digital needs as they arise.
Ongoing Workflows for Optimization
You need to ensure that your multi-environment workflows are audited regularly for optimization. For example, efforts to understand any inefficiencies, stagnation, or redundant processes that are not operating effectively can go a long way when it comes to effective content management. By applying findings from such audits to continuously refine and streamline workflows, including opportunities for increased automation, these efforts create efficiencies that are permanent through the expectation for ongoing productivity and reliability. Such efforts ensure that no complacency sets in regarding workflow operations and peak performance is encouraged, which can effectively ensure better value generation during content management efforts.
Disaster Recovery and Backup Plans
When you architect multi-environment workflows with a headless CMS, it’s important to implement disaster recovery and backup plans. For example, each environment should have backups of data not just configurations but also within the independent environments, every version development, staging, and production should have its own data management attributes that should be backed up periodically to ensure disaster recovery. This needs to be complemented by recovery plans and failover procedures to restore environments as quickly as possible should something go wrong with any of the data. Effective disaster recovery efforts help secure the integrity of your content, reduce the risk of downtime due to failure performance or crashed systems, and promote business continuity across environments.
Content Migration Should Become a Practice
Content migration between environments should be just as seamless. Organizations should plan when and how content is migrated from dev to staging to production, then practice this method regularly. Where possible, content migration should happen via scripts/tools as opposed to manual human interaction to reduce human error and ensure uniformity. If teams know that content will be reliably and easily migrated at specific checkpoints, it increases the velocity and reliability of deployments as teams can shift their focus to other concerns instead of worrying about content.
Training Teams on Operating in Multiple Environments
To continually improve and increase effectiveness, training and education should be offered to all teams related to best practices for working in multi-environment situations. This includes regularly scheduled workshops, documentation, and training efforts to ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding required migration/deployment per environment and checkpoints, security opportunities, and troubleshooting measures. The more teams understand their role in the overall operation, the better they can work collaboratively, avoid human error, and engage in proper workflow that continues to improve the multi-environment effort.
Conclusion: Building Robust Multi-Environment Architectures
Building multi-environment workflows in a headless CMS requires the implementation of best practices around an ideal solution that includes, but is not limited to, clear environments, automated management, version control, access management, and monitoring. For example, a sense of clarity around what each environment is. While there are certainly overlapping pieces (development and staging might have the same pieces, and testing and production are almost identical), determining what each environment does and needs and its scope provides a better establishment for teams to understand what should be done and not done and prevents unfortunate disasters via cross-contamination or deployment from development or staging to production accidentally.
Automation promotes less human involvement (and error). By creating an automated deployment pipeline (pipeline of movement across environments, deployment of assets and coding, etc.), companies can accelerate their release cycles much more confidently. Automated integration testing and regular updates to staging can ensure things are consistently aligned across all environments without time-consuming manual approaches to find consistency. Furthermore, version control benefits from transparency and traceability better with past deployments. The more settled the integration from development to staging to production, the more awareness companies have surrounding timeline changes, code adjustments, and content alterations. The easier it is to get back to stable environments if the assets are not sufficiently aligned.
Thus, integrating such practices allows companies to take good content management capabilities to great by being resourceful, reliable, secure, and accomplishing so much more when so much more could go wrong. Ultimately, multi-environment workflows position teams for success when taking on any digital project/digital experience delivery as they keep the organization agile, flexible with built-in scalability while simultaneously keeping operational integrity. In an ever-growing competitive field, it becomes increasingly important as organizations are constantly looking for ways to innovate while simultaneously needing to keep up with industry demands.
