A Gentle Introduction to Building Serverless Apps

Note: This talk was about MongoDB Stitch, which was later rebranded to MongoDB Realm and has since been fully discontinued (September 2024). The content is preserved here as a historical reference, but the platform and its features are no longer available.

Thanks for coming to my talk, A Gentle Introduction to Building Serverless Apps. Here you will find all the resources discussed during the talk.

About#

Do you want to crank out features the business wants, or spend a lot of time writing code and capacity planning for authentication, authorization, and complicated data access? Of course we all know the answer.

In this session will begin a beginner-friendly introduction to Serverless computing. We will then do a quick overview of the MongoDB ecosystem in the 3 major cloud providers for rapid application building. Then we will walk through a guided tutorial of how to use the MongoDB Stitch serverless platform to build your elastically scalable microservices based app within minutes, complete with end-user authentication and access rules, on a fully managed MongoDB cluster in your favorite cloud platform.

Video#

Slides#

View the slides on SpeakerDeck

20 Min Version

Outline#

Introduction to Serverless

• What is serverless?
  • Devs don’t manage anything, except for their application code
  • Runs only when needed
  • Scales automagically
  • Pay per function execution-only
• Why it’s popular
  • No managing of infrastructure whatsoever.
  • No provisioning.
  • No patching.
  • No capacity planning.
  • No scaling.
• Sounds great - what’s the catch?
  • No control over infra can be bad - need to be warmed up servers
  • State is external
  • DevOps is still a thing
• When should you go Serverless?
  • Occasional Server needs on a static site
  • Variable traffic levels
  • Additional compute without extending the current system
  • Any web app that you want to be cheaper!
• Introduce Stitch
  • What is it?
    • A serverless platform that makes it easy to build modern, cross-platform apps with MongoDB
    • QueryAnywhere
    • Functions
    • Triggers
    • Mobile Sync
  • How does it compare to other providers?
    • Stitch actually can be used on any cloud platform! Flexibility to be co-located with a cloud provider of your choice means that there is no added network latency, and the boxes are tuned nicely to make sure MongoDB is humming along just fine.
    • MongoDB Stitch is designed to work with a broad set of applications. It is especially suitable if you plan on implementing most of your application’s logic in the frontend - with the backend focussed on accessing the database and other public or internal services.
    • If you have an existing MongoDB database, then Stitch can be used to safely and selectively expose your existing data to new applications.
• Guided Serverless Tutorial
  • Introduce Project
    • Tech stack
    • Architecture
  • Connecting
  • How to Query a DB
  • Serverless Function
  • Serverless triggers
• The future of serverless
  • The continued rise of abstraction
  • Cheaper, easy and performance bugs will be fixed
  • More services will have a Serverless option
  • MongoDB acquired Realm
• FAQ
  • Can I use this for free?
    • Yes! Stitch provides a free tier:
    • The first 25 GB of data transfer per month is free.
    • The minimum of 1,000,000 requests and 100,000 GB-seconds compute per month are free.
  • Do I have to use the GUI?
    • No, There is a CLI available
    • Atlas Serverless Instances docs
  • Do I have to use JS to write serverless functions?
    • Yes
• Recap/Questions

Related Links#

• MongoDB University
• MongoDB Developer Hub (now discontinued)
• MongoDB Community Forums
• Realm Docs (now discontinued - the Realm/Stitch documentation is no longer available)
• My blog covering the app being built during this talk can be found here: A Gentle Introduction to Setting Up a React and MongoDB Stitch App From Scratch in 10 Minutes