Zoho launches Catalyst, a full-stack serverless platform for developers

Zoho Corporation, a global, privately held company that offers the most comprehensive suite of business software applications in the industry, announced the release of Catalyst, the company’s visionary full-stack serverless platform for developers.

Catalyst is a simple to use yet extremely powerful offering that allows developers to create and run microservices and applications. Catalyst gives developers access to the same underlying services and frameworks that power Zoho’s 45+ applications used by more than 45 million users around the world.

As a technology company, Zoho has built and vertically integrated all of the layers of its tech stack, from applications to app infrastructure to operating systems to network infrastructure all the way down to data centers.

It has been a decades-long investment in technology, and now this reliable, scalable, and secure infrastructure—and all that it promises—is being opened up to developers.

“The best craftsmen make their own tools. To create the comprehensive suite of business apps that we offer today, we had to build tools first. Those tools, along with the infrastructure we built over the years, is now available to developers through Catalyst,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s Chief Evangelist.

“With a strong belief in developer 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.”

“For us, Catalyst is a business application platform that allows specific vertical applications to be quickly developed, tested, deployed, and supported, without having to worry about global standards, infrastructure, and support,” said Reg Horman, Director of IT and Systems for The Pexion Group, which provides advanced manufacturing capability from around the United Kingdom.

“Zoho Catalyst sits at the core of our serverless strategy and gives us the flexibility to digitize several of our manufacturing processes.”

Catalyst has already empowered developers to build services and applications, including a bug-filing bridge application, an app used to import users into a CRM, a microservice for lead distribution, a data-cleansing microservice, and more. Here are some of the key features of Catalyst:

Back-end as a Service

• Catalyst provides scalable storage for both structured and unstructured data via easy-to-use relational databases and file stores.
• Listeners enable developers to monitor Catalyst’s databases and file stores for changes in real time, while schedulers allow for the execution of functions at set-time intervals.

Function as a Service

• Over the past 13 years, more than 26 million functions have been built and executed on Zoho’s infrastructure by more than 200,000 developers. The expertise we’ve gained in this time is today being exposed to developers as Function as a Service.
• Powerful server-side functions can be created in Catalyst by developers in their preferred programming languages, including Java, Node.js, and Python.
• In addition to using the services provided by Zoho, developers can build their own microservices by utilizing Catalyst’s functions and persistent data stores.

Microservices

• Zoho is exposing some of the same functionality it uses to support its own apps and services as microservices in Catalyst. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and object detection are currently available, with more services such as anomaly detection and prediction analysis on the way.
• In the coming months, Zoho will expose business-oriented services such as grammar and diction checking (powered by Zoho Writer) and document previews (powered by Zoho Docs). Zoho will expose more microservices through the platform.
• Developers can use Catalyst to access other out-of-the-box services including sign-up and authentication, push notifications, search indexing, and emailing.

Tools by developers, for developers

• Catalyst’s unified interface drives developer productivity by enabling them to access all necessary tools from a single location.
• Catalyst provides web and mobile SDKs and APIs for developers to easily build serverless applications.
• Catalyst provides powerful command-line tools that enable developers to build, test, and deploy.
• Developers can simply create multiple sandbox environments to test their application before taking it to production.
• Developers are able to host their web applications within Catalyst as well as manage distribution via built-in Mobile Device Management (MDM).
• Catalyst comes with extensive performance monitoring and metrics for tracking usage in real time.