Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote a post titled “I Want a New Platform” which led to our investment in MongoDB. At the time the company was called 10gen and had developed a Platform as a Service: a Javascript application server with a built in database. It turned out that we were ahead of the times (this was before Google App Engine and before Node). People wanted infrastructure as a service and AWS grew by leaps and bounds. 10gen found little adoption until the team decided to mothball the application server and make the database available separately. From there on MongoDB experienced rapid growth.
That history is why I am particularly thrilled about the release of MongoDB’s Stitch service today at MongoDB World. Stitch is Backend as a Service for web and mobile apps. What makes Stitch special is that it seamlessly integrates MongoDB with services such as Twilio and Slack using a declarative approach. This dramatically reduces how much glue code needs to be written, enables reuse of Stitch pipelines, and provides autoscaling. All while giving you complete MongoDB based access to and manipulation of your data and even handling user authentication (including access controls based on that authentication).
Getting up and running with Stitch is super fast and there is a free plan. I used a pre-release version to build a system for texting reminders to myself. I was able to build the whole thing in Stitch using MongoDB and Twilio with only a couple of declarative pipelines and zero custom code. Go and give it a whirl!
