Tag: Possible

What if you could cut your hosting costs by 80%? Webiny Serverless CMS makes it possible.

Posted on January 21, 2021 in Design

Are you hosting one or more websites and are using a headless CMS? Are you hosting your CMS on a virtual machine or a container, or using a SaaS solution? If so, then you’re paying for the uptime, regardless if the server or service is serving requests or not. Essentially, you are paying for stuff you are not using. And in this article look at how how you can change that and save up to 80% of your hosting cost along the way.

Serverless — what’s that about?

If you’re new to serverless, in short, serverless is set of services you’re consuming without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. There are services for compute, like AWS Lambda that allow you to run Node.js code, services for storage like S3, database as a service like DynamoDb and many others.

The benefits of serverless are:

  1. You are billed based on your consumption
  2. There are no servers for you to manage
  3. Services scale automatically
  4. Services are more secure than your regular server

Servers are still there, but they are abstracted away — out of sight, out of mind.

Out of all the benefits, the first one plays a big role. Picture an API on a regular server or a virtual machine. If that server is not handling a new request every few seconds, there is a lot of idle time where the server is not doing anything, but you’re still paying for it.

With serverless you pay per your consumption, if your API is not handling any request at that point in time, your cost is $ 0. To further back this case, a research made by Deloitte found that a larger system can save anywhere between 60-80% in infrastructure costs and up to 60% in management costs just by switching to serverless.

Although serverless sounds great, there is a down side to it. It’s quite complex and time consuming to create new solutions from scratch and existing solutions are not designed for such environments. This is where Webiny comes in.

Webiny Serverless CMS

To help you adopt serverless and build websites on top of this modern infrastructure, there is one solution you can use today, for free. Webiny Serverless CMS is an open source solution that comes with a few apps, including a GraphQL-based Headless CMS.

Some of its features:

  1. GraphQL API
  2. Content versioning and modeling through a UI
  3. Multi-tenancy & Multi-language support
  4. Powerful user access control
  5. Built-in image optimization and image editor
  6. Works with existing static page generators like Gatsby and others

It’s important to note that Webiny Serverless CMS is completely free and self-hosted — all you need is an AWS account.

The system is self-hosted on top of the AWS serverless offering, and your sites will benefit from it in the following ways:

  • High-availability and fault tolerance for your API
  • 99.999999999% (11 9’s) of data durability
  • Enterprise-grade secure and scalable ACL
  • Event-driven scalability — pay for what you use
  • Great performance using a global CDN
  • DDoS Protection of your APIs

All this is in the box and it takes less than 10 minutes to get up and running.

Comparing Webiny to other solutions on the market — this is what it looks like:

Get started with Webiny Serverless CMS and stop overpaying for your infrastructure.

Check it out

The post What if you could cut your hosting costs by 80%? Webiny Serverless CMS makes it possible. appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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First Steps into a Possible CSS Masonry Layout

Posted on May 18, 2020 in Design

It’s not at the level of demand as, say, container queries, but being able to make “masonry” layouts in CSS has been a big ask for CSS developers for a long time. Masonry being that kind of layout where unevenly-sized elements are layed out in ragged rows. Sorta like a typical brick wall turned sideways.

The layout alone is achievable in CSS alone already, but with one big caveat: the items aren’t arranged in rows, they are arranged in columns, which is often a deal-breaker for folks.

/* People usually don't want this */  1  4  6  8 2     7 3  5     9

/* They want this *.  1  2  3  4 5  6     7 8     9

If you want that ragged row thing and horizontal source order, you’re in JavaScript territory. Until now, that is, as Firefox rolled this out under a feature flag in Firefox Nightly, as part of CSS grid.

Mats Palmgren:

An implementation of this proposal is now available in Firefox Nightly. It is disabled by default, so you need to load about:config and set the preference layout.css.grid-template-masonry-value.enabled to true to enable it (type “masonry” in the search box on that page and it will show you that pref).

Jen Simmons has created some demos already:

Is this really a grid?

A bit of pushback from Rachel Andrew…

Grid isn’t Masonry, because it’s a grid with strict rows and columns. If you take another look at the layout created by Masonry, we don’t have strict rows and columns. Typically we have defined rows, but the columns act more like a flex layout, or Multicol. The key difference between the layout you get with Multicol and a Masonry layout, is that in Multicol the items are displayed by column. Typically in a Masonry layout you want them displayed row-wise.

[…]

Speaking personally, I am not a huge fan of this being part of the Grid specification. It is certainly compelling at first glance, however I feel that this is a relatively specialist layout mode and actually isn’t a grid at all. It is more akin to flex layout than grid layout.

By placing this layout method into the Grid spec I worry that we then tie ourselves to needing to support the Masonry functionality with any other additions to Grid.

None of this is final yet, and there is active CSS Working Group discussion about it.

As Jen said:

This is an experimental implementation — being discussed as a possible CSS specification. It is NOT yet official, and likely will change. Do not write blog posts saying this is definitely a thing. It’s not a thing. Not yet. It’s an experiment. A prototype. If you have thoughts, chime in at the CSSWG.

Houdini?

Last time there was chatter about native masonry, it was mingled with idea that the CSS Layout API, as part of Houdini, could do this. That is a thing, as you can see by opening this demo (repo) in Chrome Canary.

I’m not totally up to speed on whether Houdini is intended to be a thing so that ideas like this can be prototyped in the browser and ultimately moved out of Houdini, or if the ideas should just stay in Houdini, or what.

The post First Steps into a Possible CSS Masonry Layout appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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