Operations

Pre-authorised access

GET /preauth/

Pre-authorised routes serve content to callers that cannot hold a normal credential — a public marketing site, a preview link shared with a reviewer.

Caution

Scope these deliberately. This is the surface where “headless CMS” most often becomes “public read access to everything”, and the failure is silent: nothing errors, content is simply readable by anyone who finds the URL. Audit what pre-auth actually exposes before launch, and again whenever a content type is added.

Storage

Asset stores grow monotonically in practice. Uploads are frequent, deletions are rare, and nobody notices until the bill or the backup window does.

Because stores are separate from content apps, retention is a storage decision you can make independently of content — which is the point of the separation, but only if someone actually makes it.

GraphQL cost

A GraphQL endpoint derived from a rich content model permits deep nested queries, and depth is where cost lives. A query that walks four levels of references is doing four levels of resolution per result.

Watch query depth and shape rather than request count. One expensive query pattern from one page template will dominate a large volume of cheap ones.

Validation

Entry validation failures at write time are usually a signal about the type, not the entry. A content type that editors keep failing has drifted from how they actually work, and the fix is normally the model rather than the training.

What to watch

Signal	Why it matters
Entry validation failures	A content type that has drifted from real editorial practice
Asset store growth	Uploads are rarely deleted; storage is the cost that creeps
GraphQL query depth	Deep nested queries on a rich model get expensive fast
Pre-auth traffic and paths	Verify it is serving what you intended to make public
Publish-to-visible latency	Editors lose trust in a CMS that feels slow to update