Hi folks, I’m planning a headless setup with Drupal as the CMS and Next.js as the frontend (likely using JSON:API or GraphQL). I’m trying to choose a PaaS hosting approach that’s reliable and not a DevOps time sink.

I’m looking for advice from anyone who’s actually run Drupal headless in production with Next.js.

What I’d love help with:

Which PaaS worked well for you (single platform vs split hosting)?

How did you handle media storage (S3 offload, etc.) and CDN?

Best practices for cache strategy (Drupal cache + Redis + CDN, ISR, etc.)

Any gotchas with build times, preview environments, multisite, cron/queues

Security setup: keeping Drupal/admin private, WAF/rate limiting, API auth patterns

Questions:

1. If you’ve done this, what would you pick today and why?
2. Any recommended reference architectures or repo templates?
3. Any Drupal headless “SDKs” / tooling you liked (JSON:API clients, GraphQL, auth, image styles, etc.)?

If you can share rough sizing/cost ranges or what surprised you in production, even better.

I’ve been comparing hosting options and noticed that services like Linode or DigitalOcean ... don’t really offer much in terms of DevOps automation or collaboration tools. Meanwhile, platforms like Pantheon, Acquia, and Platform.sh provide some really advanced features — things like full, application-aware snapshots (flushing MySQL/Redis/Solr before taking them), instant environment cloning per Git branch, and seamless Git-based deployments.

You can debug live environments, integrate directly with GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket, and easily manage multi-app setups (frontends, APIs, microservices, etc.) in a single project. It’s incredibly convenient for Drupal team development, though obviously, not cheap.

I know it’s difficult to fully replicate what Platform.sh provide, but I’d love to know what kind of tech stack and workflows people are using to get close.

I’m not a DevOps engineer, just a Drupal developer who wants to experiment with a similar setup for training and learning purposes, maybe something I could host myself and use to practice modern deployment workflows.