Catalyst by Zoho

Catalyst is a full-stack cloud-based serverless development tool that provides backend functionalities to build microservices and applications in various platforms. Catalyst adapts a BaaS (Backend as a Service) model and provides pre-written, universal, server-side components from a unified interface as programmable elements. Catalyst allows developers to focus more on designing the user experience of the serverless applications, instead of investing time and effort into setting up and maintaining the server-side components. The user can deploy applications and microservices at scale, while Zoho takes care of everything else—to reduce development cycle and operational costs.

What can be built with Catalyst?

Catalyst helps build a variety of applications and microservices without needing to worry about the backend infrastructure. Catalyst provides three major components:

• Backend as a Service
  
• Function as a Service
  
• Web Client Hosting

These pre-built services coupled with other Catalyst tools like, push notifications and emails, authentication, Advanced AI solutions and more provide a complete serverless suite for app development.

By leveraging these pre-built services users can build several microservices and reduce the time to launch. Here are some common use cases:

• Building customized web and mobile applications
  
• Building REST APIs that can serve as the integration for various applications, on both web and mobile
  
• Building data processing pipelines that run in the background as a microservice for things like data migration and data analysis
  
• Running scheduled jobs at set intervals of time, to perform tasks such as cleaning databases, and analyzing logs

Advantages

Rapid application development: Catalyst enables developers to deploy applications at scale without worrying about managing servers. This drastically improves the time to market.

Near-zero server maintenance: Catalyst takes care of all the maintenance work, like provisioning, logging, patching, and keeping hardware and software updated.

Elastic scaling: Catalyst scales applications automatically as requests come in, so you don’t have to scale your applications manually.

Pay per use: Elastic scaling and pay per use go hand in hand, as users pay for what is used—not the resources that were idle.

Security and privacy: Zoho states they take privacy and security very seriously, which is why they run their own servers. By running applications on Zoho’s infrastructure, the user inherits all the effort put in to keeping their servers secure and private.

Who can use Catalyst?

• Independent developers looking to create fully customized web or mobile applications.
  
• Systems integrators looking to run one-off or responsive microservices that help to integrate products or systems.
  
• IT teams looking to modernize parts of their applications through the latest serverless architecture.
  
• Startups looking to ship software applications fast, at scale.