Headless CMS Strapi Plans a Platform-as-a-Service

Open source content management system Strapi will soon be extended to the cloud, where it will be offered as a platform-as-a-service.

The PaaS model will allow the company to embrace its open source DNA while targeting developers who don’t want to manage application infrastructure, Aurelien Georget, Strapi co-founder and chief product officer, told The New Stack. PaaS is the first step to providing a full software-as-a-service experience in the coming years, he added.

“At Strapi, we have been focused on developers from day one,” Georget said. “It won’t change for Strapi Cloud.”

The offering is currently in alpha with a dozen users through September, when it will start beta with a few hundred users by the end of the year. The plans are to launch for general availability in January 2023, a spokesperson said.

Strapi is Node.js-based and 100% JavaScript. It runs an HTTP server based on Koa, a back-end JavaScript framework. A platform-as-a-service approach supports more customization and flexibility than a software-as-a-service approach, Georget explained.

Users will be able to install plugins and add new endpoints, making it easy to personalize projects locally and deploy, he added.

The CMS has 2,000 plugins developed by the community in its ecosystem that will be able to be leveraged by a PaaS approach. It’s a win-win situation for developers and Strapi.

“We stick to the developer workflows, they enjoy the performance and they keep their productivity at their highest level by coding in their machine, while enjoying all the benefits of being in the cloud,” he said.

The headless CMS aims to simplify backend development by abstracting complex tasks, he added. It also gives developers the ability to use their choice of front-end frameworks.

“By being open-source, free, 100% JavaScript — with TypeScript support — and highly customizable, Strapi is loved by frontend developers,” Georget said. “However, the cloud was the missing piece. It was creating a dependency to a backend/DevOps engineer to deploy and host the project.“

How Frontend Developers Benefit

Strapi cloud resolves that problem, allowing frontend developers to handle the backend tasks, he said.

“They will be able to use the same tool and workflows — npm, VSCode, JavaScript, git — at full speed in their machine without the hassle of deploying Strapi on production,” he said.

That said, offering a PaaS is about simplifying use for content editors, Georget added. Users weren’t able to easily deploy Strapi even though most of them were following Strapi deployment guides, he said.

Most customers also deployed on one of the top three cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. However, in a recent survey of customers, Strapi saw interest in PaaS offerings such as DigitalOcean and Heroku.

The company plans to remain agnostic when it comes to hosting services. It will support all frontend hosting providers, such as Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare by building native integrations with those offerings, he said.

“Currently, using these platforms could be easier,” Georget said. “They are cloud solutions, developing a project locally as you do with Strapi as a lot of advantages but also tradeoffs, by making the path from development to production easier and faster, connecting their Strapi projects with these solutions will make the developer experience better and straightforward.”

The Paris-based company last month raised $31 million in Series B funding, which CEO Pierre Burgy Sid would help launch Strapi Cloud, as well as bring in additional tech and solution providers to Strapi, according to news reports.