Eliminating friction and delays in digital experience delivery

For ease of talking about it, let's say on the back end you have things like your inventory database, CRM, payment processor, and all kinds of different stuff. Maybe even tools like AI and machine learning and those kinds of things. You'll have some kind of database architecture, and you'll have your content management system. As you move further away from those back-of-house systems and data warehouse tools, you start moving toward the front end where your website is. It might even go further than your website. You might have Internet of Things [devices] and all kinds of really far-out futuristic stuff where we will end up sometime in the months and years to come.

When you think monolithic, a lot of those things that I mentioned coexist in one system, or they are one system. Tools like a traditional monolithic CMS, a lot of times, are built on lots of different components, but they're stitched together in a proprietary way. So what you get is what you get. Contrast that with composability; all those different parts of that supply chain I mentioned could come from different suppliers. One or two of them might be something that is really close to your business, so you build it yourself, or it's very proprietary, so you'll use a tool like Contentstack, a headless CMS, as one component of that. ... What's really beautiful about it is you can fine-tune and tailor the tools that you need to meet the exact outcomes that you're looking for.

What's a little bit mystifying about composable is that it doesn't just eliminate friction for you out of the box because you went composable. What it does is it gives you control over the friction so that you can pick to add or remove friction where you need to add or remove it. There are some things you want to do in your supply chain that are high friction. Like you want your legal team to stop a piece of content and look at it and read it to make sure that it's in compliance before it goes to the next stage. What you don't want is your engineering team being siloed off in some other building, not really talking to your content managers using completely different tools or a completely different system.

Launch is very cool because one of the biggest transaction costs in migrating over or booting up your next-gen digital experience is procurement. One of the things about Launch that is novel and unique is its proximity to the rest of the tools that you need. You've got your CMS where your content lives. You've got your automation tools and extensions. Well, now you have Launch, your front-end hosting, and it's a container where you host your front-end website, and it delivers very low latency, very high-performance caching, all of the things that you demand and expect from a modern front-end headless hosting tool. If you are leveraging Contentstack's suite of digital experience tools, you're already ahead of the game and can get to market faster with your new project because right out of the gate, you don't have to procure two things at once or procure one and then the other. You've got a tool that's just ready to go with your front end

One of the really great features of Launch is that we can instantly connect to your stacks in the CMS and import your environment variables. We can do that faster and in fewer clicks, but also, we don't have to have developers sharing lots of different credentials. If somebody leaves a company, we don't necessarily have to go and figure out all the sticky notes and where they were keeping their API keys. We could recycle those API keys really quickly and redeploy the site. We also have Automation Hub connectivity with Launch, so you can trigger redeployment when a new piece of content goes live, for example.

Technologically speaking, where we're going is closer and closer to the end user in extremely low latency, very close geographically, computing and data access and availability. I think when a lot of people hear that, they think, oh, so it's gonna be faster, and yes, it is going to be faster. But a lot of the potential innovation in technology is only held back by the resources that we have available at any given moment. ChatGTP, for example, could not exist until certain conditions emerged.

No. Not at all. As much as these tools share DNA and it allows us to do really cool things and save you a lot of time and effort in stitching these components together and even integrating other components, it's one option for you.

There are myriad front-end development frameworks. You can use any of these with Launch. You simply connect to your repository, like GitHub, and put in your build commands and output directory. The build command is where you would put your framework-specific commands. There's a lot of flexibility in how you leverage Launch—being framework-agnostic is one such flexibility.