Hasura, a company that creates tools for developers on top of the popular Postgres database, is introducing a new product in public Alpha today aimed at helping programmers build serverless apps more quickly and efficiently.
The idea is to simplify function writing by offering an open source event system on top of Postgres to trigger events when certain conditions are met in the underlying database. This should help reduce the amount of coding needed to make something work, while also driving a more scalable system.
Typically, programmers string together a series of API calls to services to take care of different parts of an app such as calling a payment or communications gateway. This saves the programmer from having to create the various pieces from scratch. The problem is that if anything goes wrong in the middle of a string of calls, the system can break down and typically has to start over.
By taking advantage of serverless architecture, they believe they can simplify the entire process by removing the need to worry about the underlying infrastructure — one of the primary value propositions of serverless — while providing a much simpler asynchronous event-driven approach to coding that is less prone to breaking down as it calls the various parts of the application.
The company got $1.6 million in seed funding in April. It has been offering a Kubernetes solution, but with this announcement it is expanding into serverless, as it has gained in popularity with developers.
At the time of the funding, CEO and co-founder Tanmai Gopal told TechCrunch, “Our focus from the beginning has been making the application development super fast. How we do that is placing our APIs on top of a Postgres database to deploy any kind of code,” he explained in April.
The newest product is an extension of this philosophy by letting developers take that cloud-native approach announced in the spring, and giving developers tools to take advantage of serverless in an open source, vendor-agnostic way.