A Gentle Introduction to Building Serverless Apps
MongoDB Stitch was rebranded to Realm and fully discontinued in September 2024. This tutorial will not work with current MongoDB services.

| 3 min read

A Gentle Introduction to Building Serverless Apps

Dev Tools

TL;DR

A beginner-friendly intro to serverless computing using MongoDB Stitch. The platform is now discontinued, but the serverless concepts still hold up.

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 The content is preserved here as a historical reference, but the platform and its features are no longer available.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?
    • Do I have to use JS to write serverless functions?
      • Yes
  • Recap/Questions