Content Migration: From Monolith to Composability

TL;DR

If your current CMS is slowing your team down, locking you into developer dependencies, or making it hard to deliver content across channels, it's worth looking at an API first, headless platform. This article walks you through why teams migrate to Agility CMS, what to do before you switch, and how to move from a monolithic platform without disrupting your business. The short version: assess your pain points first, get clear on what you need, plan in phases, and train your team early. Agility handles the rest.

3 Reasons to Migrate to a Headless/API-First Content Management Platform

1. Complete Control Over Your Content and Workflows 

A composable platform like Agility CMS gives you complete control over your content, allowing you to model each piece of content to build custom digital experiences. Agility also will enable you to create workflows to streamline approval processes.

     2. Fast Product Delivery

Agility CMS allows for a phased delivery using modern development frameworks and DevOps techniques to increase ROI. 

     3. Better UX 

Agility CMS allows developers to build clean, snappy UIs that delight users and simplify navigating. At the same time, composability is excellent for developer experience as it removes the constraints monolithic architecture places on them.

Watch: How Composability is Disrupting Legacy DXP

How to Migrate From Monolith to Composable Solution 

Assess Your Needs

Migrating just for the sake of it will leave you financially and emotionally drained. Before ditching your monolith system, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Sitecore, Drupal, etc. you must evaluate your existing implementation and see why you need to make the switch. 

Dig deep and see your current pain points and how Agility could help you solve them. Also, be clear on your expectations and establish a risk mitigation plan to reduce the possibility that such a project could hurt your customers or visitors. 

Be Clear on What You Want From Your New Solution 

We all want the perfect solution. Be clear on what you need from your CMS in terms of features and technologies. You can only create the perfect composable, headless, API first content management system if you know what you want to achieve. Otherwise, you'll always be scrambling for new features and functionalities, resulting in an unwieldy, haphazardly built platform.

Choose Your Tech Stack

Once you know your business and features needs, take a long, hard look at your existing tool and tech stack and see if it can be integrated with your composable, headless, API-first platform. 

If you're migrating to Agility CMS, chances are they can be combined. Agility CMS allows you complete freedom to choose what works for you and orchestrates every piece of your tool stack to work in sync. 

Plan Phase One of Your Migration

Here's where planning starts. By this point, you've probably conceptualized your migration and have a series of requirements, and that's great. It's time to get to work. 

Train Your Team

Training often goes overlooked, even though it's one place you should focus more on. Agility and its partners provide extensive documentation, resources and human support from the start, to ensure a smooth transition. 

Failing to train your collaborators properly can derail your migration. Even the best plans can fail due to human error or poor adoption by your collaborators. To prevent that, find a champion. Someone who knows about composability and headless architecture is driven to spearhead change. Talk to the team at agilitycms.com to see how our team supports a migration.

Prepare Your Content

It's essential to structure your content correctly so it can be reused. For this process, you'll first need to determine what reusable structures are being created. Then use metadata appropriately and attributes depending on how it's categorized into taxonomies.

Let's break that down a bit further. 

The first step in creating reusable content is to determine what type of items you'll be using it for and how they should best carry their information. The best way to structure your content is by determining what type of things you'll be putting in it and then correctly categorizing them with taxonomies. You can also define relations between different types if needed. 

Deploy and Secure Your Website

Don't wait until you're close to the deployment of Phase 1 before you think about DevOps. Instead, set this up on day 1 with proper source control, the main branch, and optional branches for QA and UAT.

Then, before it comes time to go live, sit down with your team and as many stakeholders as possible to build a checklist of all the things that need to happen. Since getting simple things like DNS changes can sometimes take many approval processes and days of calendar time, make sure to have those things ready to go well ahead of your launch schedule.

History of Enterprise CMS's

Sitecore was one of the first Enterprise CMSs in the market. The platform had spearheaded CMS adoption for over two decades and inspired many other CMSs currently disrupting the sector. 

While their experience in the field is excellent, the CMS market values functionality more than reputation. Going composable, headless and using an API first architecture, like Agility's headless capabilities include increased flexibility and scalability. Separating the presentation layer –the front end– from the content management layer –the database allows for more modularity and future-proofing. 

This can be especially beneficial for companies that want to move away from a monolithic platform like Sitecore, Adoebe Experience Manager, Drupal and others, and build their website on top of a modern stack, like Agility CMS.

Agility is a top contender if you're looking to migrate from a monolith to a Content Platform capable of orchestrating composable digital experiences! 

Why Not Build on a Monolith Content Management System?

For decades, most software was built as a monolith, a software architecture where all the application parts are interconnected and often interdependent, king as a self-contained whole. 

Back then, it made sense to build monoliths because they made the early stages of application development more accessible, but that's not the case anymore, thanks to the headless architecture.

While monoliths  like, Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager, Druapl and others, have been making overtures to the headless architecture and composable approach, it's still not the best choice to make, mainly due to three factors:

• Cost: Scaling monolithic applications is not only painful but also often inefficient. While a monolith can be scaled horizontally with relative ease –add a load balancer and as many instances of the application as are required– this approach can be overly expensive.
• Security: Since everything is interconnected, when one element has an error, it can impact many other features or crash the program entirely. The same happens with vulnerabilities, as a single attack vector can compromise your entire website or app.
• Maintainability: Every app grows in complexity as time goes by, causing your codebase to become large and difficult to manage. In monolithic apps, changing one function can break another part somewhere else in the code that relied on it. This means that even in the case of a minor update to a single feature, the entire application must be recompiled and tested.

Read More: 5 Steps: Monolithic to Microservices Architecture

Why is Composable, Headless and API-First Architecture is the Future? 

Composability means creating software products using interchangeable blocks composed of microservices and frameworks, just like you would with a Lego set. This approach is contrary to monolithic architecture primarily due to these reasons:

• Services-based: Your applications are built on independent services that work together in sync.

• Pick what you need: Choose your adventure and build your applications using your favourite tool stack. 

• Grows with you: You can swap services and keep your application going without re-architecture everything. 

• Secure and scalable: Scale only the services you need instead of your whole architecture while preventing unscrupulous actors from meddling with your system.

All in all, composability breaks down monolithic applications into discrete components. Each component can be built, scaled, and maintained independently, enabling businesses to adopt new technologies and processes.  

Get Started With Agility CMS

All in all, leveraging the right technologies combined with the right implementation partner is the best way to get your foot on the composable door. It can help you build a future-proof, resilient composable platform that results in better customer experiences and more media formats, such as web pages or mobile applications across various channels.

Agility is the best choice if you're looking for a modern, headless CMS that can easily integrate with your existing Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager and/or Drupal installation. Our platform is designed to make migrating from a monolithic digital experience platform easy and painless so that you can take advantage of the benefits of a decoupled architecture immediately. 

If you have questions about our platform or how we can help you migrate, watch this video where Joel Varty, Tim Benniks, and Marcelo Lewin talk about why companies should think about migrating to a composable architecture: