Case Study

Delivering A Well-Architected Headless CMS Marketing Website on AWS

Services Provided: Web Development, CMS Solutions

Big Sky Aerial Solutions (BSAS) is a sUAS-enabled data provider that is focused on delivering high-quality spatial and related data sets via LiDAR, photogrammetry, and other sensor payloads. BSAS is focused on serving a market that requires high quality deliverables, and therefore needed to ensure that their web presence matched the caliber of their services.

Customer Challenges & Goals

BSAS came to us with requirements to deliver a budget-friendly, yet professionally designed, secure, and reliable marketing website.

The website and its underlying infrastructure had to balance and accomplish the following objectives:

Deliver a highly performant site to ensure proper user engagement
Deliver a CMS-driven website that could deliver the "right now" needs while being able to expand into a full omni-channel content hub solution as the business scales
Deliver a high-quality design and web infrastructure while optimizing costs to fit a self-funded startup budget
Ensure the durability of assets and content stored in the website's database, but within strict cost constraints

Solution Details

We implemented the headless CMS-driven website via our Strapi & Next.js AWS reference architecture that we deploy and manage via Terraform. Strapi is the leading open-source headless CMS system that can be self-hosted.

By utilizing our Strapi & Next.js reference architecture in their own AWS account (which we manage for them), BSAS gained the efficiency and simplicity of a SaaS solution while retaining ownership and custody of data, performance, and security.

We deliver Strapi via an automated CI/CD process that runs Strapi in a multi-tier architecture that utilizes various highly-available and durable AWS services.

Database tier via Amazon RDS PostgreSQL Engine with automated daily backups and a 14 day database snapshot retention policy
Strapi Media Library durable object storage via Amazon S3
Dockerized Strapi application built and deployed to EC2 by CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
Daily and release-level CVE security scanning and alerting
CDN, SSL termination, and AWS WAF protection via Amazon CloudFront
EC2 OS-level maintenance automation via Systems Manager
Overall reference architecture performance and security monitoring via CloudWatch

Screenshot of the Strapi environment tailored to the BSAS Content Types.

Customer Success

We delivered a well-architected CMS-driven website solution for BSAS that meets their startup needs while also being ready for growth. They can rest assured that their lead generation data and website content are durably stored with proper backups, security controls, and future-ready technology to enable their omni-channel marketing goals.