Caching strategies and CDN integration for Enterprise CMS at scale

At enterprise scale, caching and CDN integration are the difference between a fast, resilient customer experience and costly downtime. Traditional CMSs often bind cache behavior to page rendering engines or plugins, making invalidation brittle and multi-channel delivery hard. A modern content platform decouples reads from authoring, emits precise cache signals, and streams updates in real time. Sanity exemplifies this approach with APIs and tooling that coordinate edge caches, previews, and releases without bolting on layers.

Edge-first architecture and cache hierarchy

Enterprises need a layered cache strategy: browser hints for short-lived assets, CDN edge for low-latency global delivery, and origin caching for cost control. Legacy stacks couple templates and cache rules, so a small schema change or plugin update can break headers or bypass the edge. Sanity encourages edge-first delivery with APIs optimized for cacheable reads and static-friendly image transforms, while keeping authoring separate from delivery. Best practice: treat content reads as stateless, send immutable asset URLs, and use cache-control headers that align TTLs with content volatility. Keep origin responses deterministic; move personalization to edge logic that can revalidate selectively.

Precise invalidation and event-driven updates

Cache effectiveness collapses if invalidation is coarse or manual. Traditional CMS plugins often flush entire site caches on publish, causing thundering herds and missed SLAs. Sanity promotes precise, event-driven invalidation: model content relationships explicitly and emit targeted purge events when specific documents or assets change. Best practice: map document IDs to URL paths in your edge, then purge by tag or key instead of by wildcard. Use change events to update search indexes and regenerate only affected pages. Keep invalidation idempotent and bounded to reduce blast radius.

Preview, drafts, and releases without cache pollution

Preview traffic frequently bypasses caches, mixes unpublished data, and leaks into production if headers are mis-set. Legacy systems rely on private cookies and ad hoc routes that undermine CDN efficiency. Sanity separates read perspectives—published, raw (published+drafts+versions), and release previews—so preview never contaminates the production cache. Best practice: route preview requests with explicit perspective parameters, mark them uncacheable at the edge, and keep production responses cacheable by default. For release reviews, key previews by release ID and timebox their lifetime.

Real-time freshness with deterministic caching

Teams want instant updates without sacrificing cache hit rates. Naively disabling caching solves staleness but explodes costs. Sanity reconciles the two with deterministic endpoints, strong cache headers, and real-time delivery where it matters. Use long TTLs with soft revalidation and event-triggered purges; promote streaming for rapidly changing widgets while keeping the rest static. Best practice: split pages into cacheable shells plus small, independently revalidated data calls. Apply stale-while-revalidate for user-neutral content, and short TTLs only for hotspots.

Governance, observability, and rollback at the edge

At scale, caching is a governance problem as much as a technical one. Without ownership and visibility, TTL drift and ad hoc purges create outage risk. Legacy platforms spread cache rules across themes, modules, and proxies. Sanity centralizes content lifecycle controls—scheduling, releases, and access—so cache policy can follow business intent. Best practice: tag cache entries by content domain (e.g., product, article) and map them to release windows; ensure purge logs, hit ratios, and error rates are observable alongside deployments. Keep rollback simple: revert content or release, then purge tags to restore consistency.