Netlify for the backend

Hey all,

I hear the question where’s “Netlify for the backend” a lot or where do I host my APIs. We’ve been building a platform for API and services development for the backend and I wanted to share that with you. We’re calling the post Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend. Hopefully that makes sense. Would love to get an open discussion going about this and we could use some suggestions on what to work on for the docs to make it much easier for everyone to get started quickly.

https://blog.m3o.com/2020/11/12/netlify-for-the-frontend-micro-for-the-backend.html

Cheers
Asim

Greetings :wave:t2:

I like the idea of “Netlify for APIs” - I’m thinking like, Heroku but with even less configuration and maintenance… that sounds good. Especially if I can ship it from the same repo as the Netlify front end.

Is it correct that currently this only supports services written in Go? I couldn’t write something in JS, Ruby, C#, etc?


Jon

That’s correct we only support Go. My understanding is really that each platform is single language dominant. Web is JS, iOS is objective C, Android is Java, and we think Cloud is Go. So There likely won’t be multi-language support for development of APIs, but there will be multi-language clients in future. Hope that helps.

I currently spin up a graphql api via a lambda function that carries out all of my requests, it works pretty well except that when I hit a database, since its not controlled by netlify I have to ensure that my db and my functions are in the same region to reduce latency. I think it works pretty well though. I personally would love to see Netlify extend to provide databases as a service, even if its an abstraction off of AWS again, Netlify makes DX with AWS 100x easier imo.

Opinions?

@AaronP Have you looked at Netlify’s Partner Add-on with FaundaDB? Globally distributed / instance replication across region server-less db might do the trick for you :slight_smile:


Jon

Yeap, I have. It’s just not something I want to rely on and tbh I do not like the FQL implementation. I still consider it here and there but havent gone back to it since I first tried it. Since everything else netlify is abstracted from AWS, it would be nice to see that same with db

1 Like

Gotcha. Well we’ll see what they have in the future!

Yeahh, that or I just suck it up and get past the over-complicated UI of AWS :smiley:

Hah. Yeah the AWS interface isn’t the most pleasant, that’s for sure. I’d be a little surprised if Netlify ends up building that abstraction because it would be pretty complex and they already partnered with Fauna :stuck_out_tongue: which is built on AWS AFAIK. I think most JAMstack folks are probably using a headless CMS as more of a database than a legitimate database anyway :thinking:


Jon

That’s a good point. Im not holding my breath - I’ve only just started truly understanding what JAMstack is and figuring what you can and cannot do with it. So I guess I will see when projects come along and I try JAMstack from experience I will learn when to use it and when not to.

My current idea at the moment is for something very CRUD like a quiz app where users create their own quizzes or have 1v1 live sessions etc, it would not be JAMstack.

However, a stockmarket tracking site (which I orignally thought could not be JAMstack), can actually be with data just changing via stream api events or polling.) – This site couldnt be statically served and built server side though right?

Then a blog etc could be JAMstack AND statically built.

Well good to see some of the comments here and get the feedback on what people are working on. We released a follow up blog post which might be of interest M3O ☁️. Currently we’re in the middle of building out some of the core APIs which you can deploy with one click and just start hacking away on from the frontend. The ease of use will improve in the coming weeks as we’re hacking on a couple different Jamstack apps ourselves to demo the experience.

It’s clear that user management, data storage and event streaming are probably some of the core APIs needed for a backend. If you have more ideas for services you might like to see just drop a note here GitHub - micro/services: Real World Micro Services and check out the site https://m3o.com for more info.