PayloadCMS in an Enterprise AWS Environment

PayloadCMS is a powerful headless CMS built on Node.js and MongoDB (or PostgreSQL). Deploying it at enterprise scale on AWS requires careful thought around infrastructure, auth integration, and content workflows.

Architecture Overview

We ran PayloadCMS on ECS Fargate behind an Application Load Balancer, with RDS PostgreSQL as the database. S3 handled media uploads via Payload's built-in S3 adapter.

Key Decisions

• Database: PostgreSQL over MongoDB for better RDS integration and familiar query tooling.
• Auth: Integrated Cognito as the identity provider via Payload's custom auth hooks.
• Media: S3 with CloudFront for CDN-backed asset delivery.

Lessons Learned

Payload's admin UI assumes a single origin — running behind a load balancer with sticky sessions is required for upload reliability. Plan for this early.

Content migrations between environments need a strategy: Payload's seed scripts paired with environment-specific S3 buckets worked well for us.