Case Study: GraphCMS and Tenzir

GraphCMS is great! It’s fast, stable and combined with ReasonML, it gives us compile time type checking which ultimately results in peace of mind when we deploy.

Roland PeelenFrontend Engineer at Tenzir

About Tenzir

Headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, Tenzir is an up-and-coming cybersecurity company, which aims to mitigate the effects of cyber attacks by reducing incident response time through automation. This is achieved by continuously collecting network telemetry data and then performing retrospective correlation against the recorded data as the threat landscape changes. The benefit lies in catching ongoing attacks in an early stage before they inflict damage. Tenzir redesigned their website to make developers more efficient and empower content creators to be independent with the help of GraphCMS.

The Project

Tenzir’s former marketing website was a completely static Gatsby site. It was rather difficult to easily iterate content without assistance from a technical team member. Tenzir hoped to increase the flexibility of the marketing website, create reusable content, and empower the non-technical team members to easily update content.

After comparing several headless CMSs, the team ultimately chose GraphCMS because it is GraphQL-native and offers powerful introspection queries. Their new tech stack now consists of GraphCMS, ReasonML, and Gatsby, allowing them to take full advantage of the benefits of type safe code for a static website while including the necessary flexibility. ReasonML is an ML-based language with static type checking, which, when combined with GraphQL, allows the team to import a schema using an introspection query enabling compile-time type checking.

If you want to see what ReasonML is about, go check out the ReasonML-based open-source UI component library Tenzir developed in conjunction with their GraphCMS implementation. Although finding the sweet spot for content modeling took some practice, the transition to the new tech stack was seamless.

Benefits of GraphCMS

Tenzir is an early adopter of cutting edge technologies and trends within both web and backend development. Maintaining a high level of type safety coupled with functional programming paradigm is a high priority for the Tenzir team. Every tool they select should further this goal, including GraphCMS.

Because GraphQL is a strongly typed query language, they can quickly build schemas, create relations, and query relevant data. In comparison to other CMS solutions, GraphCMS is much faster and greatly improves their developer workflows. Different user roles and content views made it straightforward even for nontechnical people to use the system without a steep learning curve.

GraphCMS provided the Tenzir team with the necessary flexibility and optimized the team’s workflows. Tenzir is looking to use GraphCMS for things other than their website as well. The stable GraphQL backend allows for quick iteration on prototypes without having to always setup a database and API but with the added benefit of having a prototype that works like it would in the real world.

Why GraphCMS?

• GraphCMS enables the Tenzir team to work efficiently using the most cutting edge tech stack.
• The system was significantly more flexible than the previous system, while still taking advantage of the benefits of static site generators.
• Content views and user roles empower non-technical team members to use the tool without need for developers when iterating content.
• GraphCMS support staff were extremely quick to respond to any questions