Choosing the Right Backend Service

Aside from your typical evaluation criteria, here are a couple considerations.

Number of services

You’ll want to have a decent idea of the scope you’re looking for and to assess the extent to which the content provider can cover that scope.

The reality is that you’re probably going to need a few services wired together to provide the complete content picture. And your developers are probably going to do that work. So the more services you have, the more time and money it will cost to get everything up and running.

Editor efficiency

Choosing which content provider to buy is one of the more challenging decisions on this journey. Many of the other decisions just have to check boxes that appease developers. Is it fast, secure, scalable, reliable, and developer-friendly? Then it’s probably a good choice.

Content providers bring added complexity as they also need to serve content editors, the primary users of the application (while developers will primarily interact with it via the API).

Visual editors have appeared on the scene, in large part to overcome the challenges with API-based content services. More on this in the next chapter.