Architecture

Big Picture Architecture Diagram

Backend

The Backend of Contentstack is the CMS with the ability to create and publish content.  The focus here is on editor ease-of-use by providing a simple, powerful and flexible UI for content creation and management.  In addition to the out of the box functionality, we also provide an ability to extend the interface by creating UI Extensions using our App SDK and connect to 3rd-party applications such as DAM providers, Analytics, E-Commerce platforms and more.

Frontend

The focus on the frontend is high-performance for your website and web application. APIs and SDKs are provided to the developer for using in their applications to perform read-only queries to the content.  The Content Delivery APIs use an internal CDN to cache all queries to the platform which results in higher performance for all your web applications.  This is also where we find the Images API for delivering image assets.

Environments

• One Stack can publish to multiple Environments.  Think of Environments as “publish destinations”.

• Each Environment has one Delivery Token, otherwise known as an Access Token.  That token is unique per Environment.

• Each Stack has an API key.  There is only 1 API key per Stack and it is unique.

• Most API calls will require both an API token and a Delivery / Access Token.