An ultra-resilient serverless infrastructure for the media sector
An attack, an election, a decisive match: when news breaks, your audience multiplies by 50 within minutes. Your editorial teams are accustomed to this pace. Your infrastructure, often less so. The traditional CMS that responds in 800ms under normal circumstances becomes a bottleneck at 2 million simultaneous visitors.
Pages time out, the content delivery network, the CDN, no longer suffices, the technical team improvises manual caches whilst the editorial team publishes at breakneck speed. And meanwhile, the audience migrates to the competitor who displays content in under a second. The problem is not merely technical: it is a matter of editorial credibility. A media outlet that crashes during a major event loses the trust of its audience: and advertisers are aware of this.
Media CTOs juggle contradictory constraints: editorial teams wanting to publish instantaneously, advertising departments demanding short loading times for their CPMs, and infrastructure budgets that have not kept pace with the explosion in mobile traffic.
This solution belongs to the Websites, Content & Communities family.
Challenges holding back your performance
The classic response: adding servers, beefing up the Varnish cache, praying: quickly reaches its limits. A monolithic CMS, even when well-optimised, remains fundamentally coupled: each request calls upon the database, the template engine, the tracking plugins. Artisanal pre-generation attempts work for 500 articles, not for 15 years of archives and 200 publications per day.As for CDNs alone, they solve nothing if the origin takes 3 seconds to respond to the first call. Technical teams spend their election nights monitoring dashboards instead of sleeping. And the full-SaaS solutions from major CMS publishers impose costs that explode precisely when traffic explodes: the worst economic model for a media outlet.
Our Technical Approach
Our approach radically separates what must be separated: editorial production on one side, distribution on the other. The editorial team retains its usual publishing interface: we adapt to your existing CMS, whether it be WordPress, Drupal or a proprietary tool. Behind the scenes, each publication triggers a targeted static generation: only the impacted files are rebuilt, not the entire site.
These pre-rendered HTML files are distributed across a global edge network.
Result: during a spike, your origin servers see virtually no traffic: everything is served from points of presence less than 50ms from your readers. The intelligence of the system lies in invalidation management: when an article is updated, the new version is propagated in less than 10 seconds across the entire network, without manual purging.
Dynamic content (counters, personalisation) is injected client-side, without blocking the initial display.
Technical Architecture
Contribute, have it approved, publish across channels: Streaming Platforms (VOD/Live) and Civic Engagement Platforms share this path.
Smooth and frictionless integration
We do not replace your CMS: we add a publishing layer in front of it. Your editorial team does not change its habits, your developers retain their templates. The migration is carried out by sections: first the recent articles with high traffic, then the archives progressively. Existing flows (advertising management, analytics, paywall) are preserved and integrated into the new front end.
Allow 6 to 10 weeks for an initial scope in production, including load testing.
Load testing audit and mapping
Analysis of your historical peaks, identification of current bottlenecks, mapping of dependencies between CMS, ad management and analytics.
Architecture of decoupling
Design of the static generation pipeline tailored to your editorial volume and freshness constraints (real-time vs. deferred).
Progressive deployment
Section-by-section migration with dual operation: the legacy system remains active whilst the new system scales up across an expanding scope.
Load testing and transfer
Simulation of traffic spikes at 10x your record audience, training of your teams, documentation of publishing and rollback procedures.
Measurable results for your organisation
- Average loading time reduced from 2.4s to 340ms on mobile 4G
- Zero downtime incidents during the last 3 electoral peaks for a national press client
- Infrastructure costs reduced by 40% despite audience growth of 25%
- Technical team freed from on-call night duties during major events
- Core Web Vitals score achieved green status on 94% of pages, with measurable SEO impact of +15% organic traffic
- Tested capacity of 8 million concurrent visitors without degradation
Clarifying your decision-making
What happens if our CMS goes down during a major event?
The site stays available: static files are already distributed on the edge network and no longer depend on the CMS. The editorial team cannot publish while the CMS is down, but the audience keeps reading without interruption. That is precisely the benefit of decoupling.
How to manage personalised content or paywalls with static content?
The static page carries the structure and the public content. Paywall, personalisation and counters load in JavaScript after initial rendering: the reader sees the content in 300 milliseconds, dynamic elements appear 200 milliseconds later. Clarendis has integrated this approach with several market solutions and bespoke developments.