Zoho Corporation on Thursday announced the release of Catalyst, a new full-stack serverless platform for developers. Catalyst allows developers to create and run microservices and applications. It offers developers, access to the same underlying services and frameworks that power Zoho’s applications. Just in case you don’t know, Zoho’s has over 45 applications that make their solutions function like an Operating System. It is used by over 45 million users globally.

Zoho’s Catalyst offers scalable storage for structured and unstructured data with user-friendly relational databases and file stores. Its listeners will help developers monitor Catalyst’s databases and file stores for changes in real-time. Schedulers will allow execution of functions at set-time intervals. It allows specific vertical applications to be quickly developed, tested, deployed and supported. The clients will not have to worry about infrastructure and international standards.

“With a strong belief in developers’ productivity, we’ve been offering several serverless capabilities to developers before it was even called serverless. Our commitment to end-to-end solutions has enabled us to offer a comprehensive suite of no-code, low-code, and pro-code tools,” said Sridhar Iyengar, Zoho’s Head of Europe.

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Build Microservices in Language of Your Choice

• Strong server-side functions can be created in Catalyst by developers in programming languages such as Java, Node.js, and Python.
• Developers can build their own microservices by using Catalyst’s functions and persistent data stores.

Zoho Opens up Its Functionalities for Developers

• Zoho will expose some of the functionality it already uses to support its apps and services as microservices in Catalyst.
• Catalyst now offers OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and object detection.
• It will very soon offer anomaly detection and prediction analysis.
• Services like grammar and diction-checking will be introduced.
• Catalyst can be used to access innovative services like sign-up and authentication, push notifications and search indexing.

“Zoho Catalyst sits at the core of our serverless strategy and gives us the flexibility to digitize several of our manufacturing processes,” said Reg Horman, Director of IT and Systems for The Pexion Group, a UK based precision engineering company. 

How Is It a Developers’ Delight?

• The unified interface allows developers to access all tools from a single location.
• Web and mobile SDKs and APIs have been made available for developers to conveniently build serverless applications.
• Catalyst’s command-line tools will assist in building, testing and deployment.
• Multiple sandbox environments can be created to test applications
• Developers can host and manage their web applications within Catalyst.
• Offers real-time performance monitoring and metrics for tracking usage.

According to Zoho, Catalyst has already empowered developers to build services and applications, including a bug-filing bridge application. Apart from this is an app used to import users into a CRM and a data-cleansing microservice among others.

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