How ACI Avoids Preview Overhead
If you have 100 content workspaces and 10 code workspaces, the naive approach is 1,000 preview environments. That’s what you get with “deploy a preview per workspace,” a combinatorial explosion that’s expensive, slow, and brittle. ACI sidesteps this entirely. Instead of deploying preview environments, ACI keeps a small pool of warm code capsules, your compiled frontend code, ready to render. When someone requests a preview, ACI hands the capsule the right content and gets HTML back. No deployment. No CI/CD. No waiting.How It Works
JIT Compile
ACI resolves the branch, the linked code artifact, and the requested route payload. The preview path renders the requested route without staging or activating a release.
Find Capsule
ACI looks for a warm code capsule matching the branch’s linked code artifact. If one exists, it’s used immediately. If not, ACI materializes and starts one.
Current URL Shape
Branch names used in preview hostnames must be lowercase host-label-safe slugs: letters, numbers, and hyphens, with no leading or trailing hyphen.
Why It’s Fast
Content-Only Changes
If the editor changes content and refreshes, the same warm capsule re-renders with the new content. No code rebuild. Sub-second response.
Code Changes
If the editor switches to a different code workspace, ACI finds (or builds) the capsule for that version. First request is slower. Subsequent requests are instant.
Single-Route Compilation
Preview compiles only the requested route, not the entire site. Even a 50,000-page site previews in under two seconds.
Warm Pool
Recently-used capsules stay warm. Active development workspaces keep their capsules hot, so previews are always fast during editing sessions.
M + N, Not M x N
The key insight: preview scales as M capsules + N content snapshots, not M x N preview environments. If your team has 5 active code workspaces and 20 active content workspaces, a traditional setup needs up to 100 preview deployments. ACI keeps 5 warm capsules and serves all 20 content variations through them.Preview never touches production. It doesn’t create releases or update CDN routing. It’s a completely separate, read-only path that renders over your existing branch and code-artifact state.
No Separate Environments Needed
Because any content snapshot can be paired with any code capsule, you get an effectively unlimited number of preview states without maintaining separate environments. No need for dedicated “dev”, “staging”, and “production” setups with their own content and code.What You Can Preview
Preview supports the full matrix of what editors and developers need to see:- Content workspace on production code: “What does my draft look like with the current live site?”
- Production content on a code workspace: “What does the current site look like with my new component?”
- Content workspace on a code workspace: “What does my new content look like with the developer’s new design?”
- Any specific route: Preview one page, not the whole site
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