New Netlify Connect Unifies Data and Content from Any Source
The new product can help organizations gradually transition from a monolithic architecture to composable commerce
Netlify has unveiled Connect, an orchestration tool that aims to help organizations transition from monolithic systems to composability by unifying their data and content from both legacy and modern sources.
In their news release announcing Connect, Netlify said it “brings all content sources and CMS applications together in a single location, giving web teams the power to orchestrate and manage how and where content is served to all front-end digital experiences.”
Many companies are dealing with the headaches of legacy systems, which still make up 41 percent of all IT infrastructure at organizations polled for a 2023 report by the MACH Alliance.
Content management, in particular, is also a major friction point for brands today. According to a survey of retailers in France, Germany, the U.K. and U.S. released earlier this year:
- only 10% of brands feel their current technology platform completely supports all their content management needs
- 11% of brands say their current platform supports “none” of their content management needs
- “mixing content marketing with product listings” is the 3rd biggest challenge cited by brands
- “ability to quickly update content” is the 8th biggest challenge
- only 17% of retailers have the capability to launch a standard online marketing campaign within one week
Netlify Connect seems aimed squarely at reducing the complexity (and time) required to use data and content from multiple legacy systems. For example, Netlify Connect could create fresh content from any legacy or brand new data source, then upload that content to all of the user’s existing or custom websites. And according to Netlify, Connect works with all front-end development cloud solutions and frameworks.
“[With Connect], you have one place where you can plug in all your different data sources and content sources. And now that works together with the developer orchestration and the operational orchestration to create one composition platform, which is really what this is a move towards,” Chris Bach, Netlify’s Co-Founder, Chief Creative Officer, and Chief Strategic Officer said in an interview at the recent MACH Two conference in Amsterdam.
Connect’s data unification capability is based on the Valhalla Content Hub developed by Gatsby, a company acquired by Netlify in February.
A single API
Through a GraphQL API, Connect offers no-code integrations with both headless and monolithic CMS solutions such as WordPress, Contentful, and Drupal. Netlify said Connect also enables no-code integrations with “commerce systems … such as Shopify.”
This means developers only need one API to build and release, but can use content from any type of CMS: legacy, custom, or modern. Netlify said this unifies all content into a single developer workflow, saving time and resources throughout the process.
“Traditionally, if you have an API and you want several content sources to pull from or vice versa, you have to write source plug-ins for each and every single one of them. Now, you have a connective tissue where you write one plug-in one time and then it’s accessible for all your different sources and destinations,” Bach said.
To further streamline the process, Connect’s automated publishing feature automatically publishes any CMS content changes to the user’s site.
Going composable in increments
Connect caches all data and content (regardless of source) at Netlify Edge, making it immediately available, improving content speeds, and enhancing website performance.
Caching all data in Netlify Edge also creates a redundancy that allows users to “swap out and update web architecture incrementally,” according to Netlify’s news release. Davis echoed that theme in his blog post, suggesting Connect can support “incremental migration toward a fully composable architecture.”
Bach said Connect’s ability to unify data and content from three disparate sources – monolith, legacy, and modern – makes this gradual shift to composability possible.
“For systems integrators, for example, it means they can say to a client, ‘Why don’t we take what you already have now, make it headless, and then go from there? Then when you have the [Connect] platform, it’s going to be much easier to implement other composable components,’” Bach said.
Connect is now in private beta with a few of Netlify’s large enterprise clients, but Bach said plans are in the works to move it to general availability soon.
Christine Wong
Senior Technology Staff Writer, Orium
I've been telling enterprise technology stories for almost three decades in print, online, and on television. I started out in journalism, covering the telecom boom, the birth of social media and the emergence of digital commerce. I'm always looking for the human angle in every technology story I write.