Top 10 Key Features of Altogic Platform

The complexity of building backend applications and maintaining environments can be time consuming when bringing your ideas to life and as the application grows. In today's world, developers are looking for ways to simplify the development process and reduce the time and effort required to build and maintain their applications. Altogic is a serverless platform that allows you to build, deploy, and manage your serverless applications.

With Altogic, even the most inexperienced developers can create production-ready and scalable backend apps in just a few simple steps. The user-friendly platform and built-in tools make it easy for anyone to get started and develop their applications, regardless of their level of experience.

Altogic is a robust and comprehensive development platform that offers a suite of tools to help developers build scalable and secure applications with ease. With its wide range of features, Altogic stands out as an swiss-knife solution that simplifies the development process by reducing the time and effort required to build complex systems. In this blog post, we will provide an in-depth review of the top features of Altogic and highlight the benefits and use cases of each one.

Authentication

Authentication is a fundamental part of any web/mobile application, and Altogic makes it easy for developers to implement authentication with its built-in authentication feature. Altogic supports a variety of authentication methods, including email/phone and password, oAuth providers, and magic link authentication. Additionally, Altogic's magic link authentication simplifies the login process for users, making it more user-friendly. This makes it easy for developers to add user authentication to their applications without having to build it from scratch, which saves a lot of development time and effort. Altogic's authentication feature also provides a wide range of customization options, allowing developers to easily customize the authentication flow, user registration, and verification processes to meet the needs of their specific use case.

Capabilities:

• Fully customizable authentication flow
• Supports multiple authentication methods, email/phone and password, oAuth providers such as, Google, Github, LinkedIn, Apple, and magic link authentication
• Provides easy integration with existing applications
• Pre-built templates for customization
• Enables secure authentication using industry-standard encryption algorithms

Benefits:

• Quick and easy to implement
• Saves developers time by providing pre-built authentication functionality
• Increases security for applications with secure authentication options
• Provides a seamless user experience with multiple authentication options

Use cases:

• E-commerce websites that require user authentication to complete purchases and manage accounts
• Social media platforms that allow users to create and log in to their accounts using social login
• Business applications that requires secure user access for employees

Realtime

Realtime is another powerful feature of Altogic that allows developers to build real-time applications that update in real-time as data changes. This is achieved through websockets, which provide a two-way communication channel between the server and the client. Realtime updates are essential for many applications, such as chat applications, stock market applications, and real-time gaming applications. Altogic's realtime feature makes it easy for developers to set up real-time updates with minimal code, which reduces development time and effort.

Capabilities:

• Uses websockets to enable real-time communication between the client and server
• Allows developers to build real-time applications that update in real-time as data changes
• Supports minimal code for developers to set up real-time updates
• Enables bi-directional communication between the client and server

Benefits:

• Enables developers to build real-time applications that provide a seamless user experience
• Eliminates the need for the user to refresh the page to see updates
• Increases engagement by allowing users to interact with real-time data
• Helps reduce server load by minimizing the number of requests sent from the client

Use cases:

• Collaborative applications, such as project management tools, can use real-time updates to keep team members up-to-date on project progress and changes, improving productivity and communication.
• Social media platforms can use real-time updates to notify users of new messages, comments, and likes, improving user engagement and satisfaction.
• E-commerce applications can use real-time updates to update customers on order status and inventory levels, improving customer satisfaction and reducing the risk of errors.
• Online gaming platforms can use real-time updates to synchronize game states across multiple players, providing a seamless and engaging gaming experience.
• Real-time dashboards for monitoring data in real-time, such as traffic updates, stock prices, or weather updates.
• Collaborative applications such as online gaming, document editing, or project management tools.

Service Flows

Altogic offers two ways to define your application business logic: no-code services and serverless functions. No-code services define your application's business logic graphically and are composed of nodes (actions) and relations (links) between these nodes. These nodes can represent a variety of actions, such as sending an email, making an API call, or running a serverless function. This allows non-technical users to easily create workflows and business processes without needing to know how to write code. No-code services can be easily customized to fit your specific business needs, and they offer a wide range of templates and pre-built integrations to make the process even easier.

For developers who prefer to write their own code, serverless functions allow them to run custom backend code that can be triggered by requests to an endpoint, message submission to a message queue, or a trigger from a cron-job. This gives developers the flexibility to create workflows that require custom logic or more complex operations. Using the Altogic CLI, developers can create and deploy their serverless functions to their app's execution environment, and benefit from the serverless nature of the platform to ensure scalability and cost efficiency.

Altogic's service flows feature allows developers to easily define and manage complex business workflows and processes without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. With the two options of no-code services and serverless functions, developers can choose the best approach for their specific needs.

By leveraging the service flows feature, businesses can automate their operations, streamline their workflows, and reduce the risk of errors and delays caused by manual processes. Additionally, Altogic's built-in support for message queues and scheduled tasks makes it easy to handle asynchronous tasks and schedule recurring jobs, further streamlining business operations.

Capabilities:

• Provides a visual interface to create, manage, and monitor workflows
• Enables easy integration with other Altogic services and third-party APIs
• Allows developers to define complex workflows with multiple steps and conditional logic
• Supports state management, enabling workflows to resume after interruption or failure

Benefits:

• Streamlines workflow development with an easy-to-use visual interface
• Simplifies the integration of multiple services and APIs
• Increases flexibility and scalability by allowing for complex workflows with conditional logic

Use cases:

• Automating business processes, such as order processing, invoice generation, and customer management
• Creating event-driven workflows, such as those triggered by user interactions or system events
• Building data pipelines that collect, transform, and store data from multiple sources
• Managing and orchestrating multi-step microservices-based architectures.

Serverless Functions

On the other hand, the full-code functions allow developers to run custom backend code that can be triggered by requests to an endpoint, message submission to a message queue, or a trigger from a cron-job. Using the Altogic CLI, developers can create and deploy their full-code functions to their app's execution environment. Serverless Functions is a feature of Altogic that allows developers to easily create and manage serverless functions for their applications. Serverless functions are small, single-purpose functions that are executed in response to an event. They are typically used to perform a specific task, such as sending an email, processing a payment, or performing a calculation.

Serverless Functions of Altogic allows developers to build scalable applications without worrying about server management. The feature supports Javascript, and developers can easily deploy and manage their serverless functions. Serverless architecture is gaining popularity because it allows developers to focus on building the core features of their applications without worrying about infrastructure management. Serverless functions are ideal for applications that have varying levels of traffic, as they can scale up and down based on demand.

One of the main benefits of Altogic's serverless functions is their scalability. With serverless architecture, applications can automatically scale up or down in response to changes in traffic, making it a cost-effective solution for businesses that experience fluctuations in traffic or usage.

In addition to scalability, Altogic's serverless functions also offer a number of other benefits, such as:

Capabilities:

• Provides an easy-to-use interface and CLI for creating, deploying, and managing serverless functions
• Supports JavaScript, which is a popular language for web development
• Provides automatic scaling and resource allocation, ensuring that functions can handle large numbers of requests
• Supports integrations with other Altogic services, such as message queues and databases
• Provides access to cloud services and APIs, such as AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions

Benefits:

• Allows developers to focus on writing code, rather than managing servers and infrastructure
• Reduces development costs by eliminating the need for dedicated server management
• Enables developers to build highly scalable applications that can handle large numbers of requests without performance issues
• Improves the speed and agility of the development process by reducing the time required for infrastructure management

Use cases:

• Building highly scalable applications that can handle large amounts of traffic, such as e-commerce platforms or social media sites
• Developing microservices that can be easily deployed and managed without the need for dedicated servers
• Creating event-driven applications that respond to changes in data or user behavior, such as real-time chat or gaming applications
• Creating applications that require access to cloud services or APIs, such as machine learning or natural language processing.

In summary, Altogic's serverless functions provide developers with a cost-effective and scalable solution for building applications. With benefits such as reduced cost, increased reliability, and easy integration, Altogic's serverless functions are well-suited for a wide range of applications and use cases.

~/src/index.js

const { createClient } = require("altogic");
const ENV_URL = null;
const CLIENT_KEY = null;

module.exports = async function (req, res) {
  // Create a client for interacting with your backend app
  // You need to provide environment url and client key as input parameters
  let altogic;

  if (!ENV_URL || !CLIENT_KEY) {
    console.warn(
      "Client library environment URL and/or client key variables are not set."
    );
  } else altogic = createClient(ENV_URL, CLIENT_KEY);

  res.json({
    quote: "Hello world!",
  });
};

Message Queues

Message Queues is a significant feature of Altogic that enables users to create message queues and route messages to their respective asynchronous services for processing. This allows businesses to handle high volumes of requests and improve their overall system performance. Altogic's message queue service also allows for the scheduling of message execution, by delaying the execution of a submitted message for a specified duration. This provides more control and flexibility over task processing. With message queues, developers can easily offload the processing of time-consuming tasks to asynchronous services, which improves the overall performance and user experience of their applications.

Capabilities:

• Create and manage message queues
• Route messages to their respective asynchronous services for processing
• Schedule message execution by delaying the execution of submitted messages for a specified duration

Benefits:

• Handle high volumes of requests
• Improve overall system performance
• Provide more control and flexibility over task processing
• Decouple services and distribute workloads across multiple servers

Use cases:

• E-commerce platforms can use message queues to process high volumes of orders and shipments, reducing the risk of errors and improving customer satisfaction.
• Healthcare applications can use message queues to manage patient records, ensuring that updates are processed quickly and efficiently.
• Financial services companies can use message queues to handle large volumes of transactions, ensuring that they are processed in a timely and accurate manner.
• Logistics companies can use message queues to manage shipping and delivery schedules, ensuring that packages are delivered on time and in the correct order.

Database

Database is a one of the core feature of Altogic that allows developers to easily set up and manage databases for their applications. The Altogic database is highly scalable and can handle large volumes of data with low latency, making it well-suited for enterprise-grade and large software applications. One of the key features that sets the Altogic database apart is its support for complex data models with relations and multilevel data hierarchies. This advanced level of data organization and querying capabilities makes it an ideal choice for specific use cases that require this level of complexity. The database's visual data model creation, importing from JSON, and management capabilities also provide a streamlined and efficient experience for developers.

Capabilities:

• Highly scalable solution for large-scale data storage and retrieval
• Ability to handle a high volume of data with low latency
• Support for complex data models with relations and multilevel data hierarchies
• Automated data model creation and management capabilities

Benefits:

• Provides a centralized and secure location for storing and retrieving data
• Enables fast and efficient access to data, improving overall system performance
• Supports complex data structures and relationships, making it well-suited for specific use cases that require this level of complexity
• Automated data model creation and management capabilities provide a streamlined and efficient experience for developers

Use cases:

• E-commerce platforms can use databases to store and manage product data, order history, and customer information, improving overall business efficiency and customer satisfaction.
• Healthcare applications can use databases to store and manage patient records, ensuring that data is secure and easily accessible to authorized users.
• Financial services companies can use databases to store and manage transaction data, ensuring that it is processed in a timely and accurate manner.
• Logistics companies can use databases to store and manage shipment and delivery data, ensuring that packages are delivered on time and in the correct

Cache

Cache is an another feature of Altogic that allows for the implementation of a high-speed data storage layer that temporarily stores a subset of data, typically transient in nature, in order to increase data retrieval performance. By reducing the need to access the underlying slower storage layer, such as a database, caching can significantly improve the response times of services. Altogic's caching capabilities allow developers to build highly performant applications that can handle large volumes of traffic.

Capabilities:

• Ability to temporarily store a subset of data in high-speed storage to improve data retrieval performance
• Supports various cache storage options, such as in-memory, on-disk, and in the cloud
• Ability to configure cache expiration policies for optimal performance

Benefits:

• Improves application performance by reducing the need to access underlying slower storage layers, such as databases
• Increases the scalability of applications by reducing the load on databases and other storage systems
• Provides fast and efficient access to frequently accessed data, improving overall system performance
• Supports horizontal scaling by allowing multiple instances to share the same cache

Use cases:

• E-commerce platforms can use caching to store frequently accessed product data, improving overall website performance and customer experience.
• Social media platforms can use caching to store frequently accessed user data, reducing database load and improving overall system performance.
• Gaming companies can use caching to store frequently accessed game data, improving overall game performance and reducing lag.
• Financial services companies can use caching to store frequently accessed transaction data, improving overall system performance and reducing response times.

Storage

Altogic's storage feature provides developers with a simple and efficient way to store and manage files for their applications. With Altogic, developers can easily store and access files such as images, videos, and documents from their applications.

Altogic's storage feature is highly scalable and can handle large volumes of data. This is particularly useful for applications that need to store and manage a large number of files. The feature also supports a variety of storage options, including object storage, file storage, and block storage, allowing developers to choose the most appropriate storage type for their specific use case.

Capabilities:

• Ability to store and manage files for applications, such as images, videos, and documents
• Supports various storage options, such as local storage, cloud storage, and distributed storage
• Allows developers to easily manage and retrieve files with a simple API

Benefits:

• Simplifies file storage and management for developers, allowing them to focus on building core application functionality
• Provides scalability and reliability for file storage, allowing applications to easily scale up or down based on demand
• Allows for easy collaboration and sharing of files across teams and applications
• Provides secure and encrypted storage options to protect sensitive data

Use cases:

• E-commerce platforms can use storage to store product images and videos, making them easily accessible to customers and improving overall user experience.
• Education platforms can use storage to store course materials and documents, making them easily accessible to students and teachers.
• Healthcare providers can use storage to securely store and manage patient data and medical images, improving overall patient care and outcomes.
• Media and entertainment companies can use storage to store and manage large files, such as video and audio files, making them easily accessible to teams and applications.

Cron Jobs

Altogic's cron-jobs feature is a powerful tool that enables developers to automate tasks that need to run on a schedule. This feature allows developers to schedule tasks such as data backups, sending emails, generating, reports, and running data analytics, among others.

It is easy to set up and configure, and offers a wide range of scheduling options. Developers can schedule tasks to run at specific times, on specific days of the week or month, or at regular intervals. This level of flexibility allows developers to easily customize their scheduling to meet the needs of their specific use case. The feature offers a simple and efficient way to manage recurring tasks, saving time and reducing the risk of human error.

Capabilities:

• Enables developers to schedule and automate tasks, such as sending emails, generating reports, and backing up data
• Supports a variety of scheduling options, such as daily, weekly, monthly, and custom schedules
• Provides a simple API for developers to easily create and manage cron jobs

Benefits:

• Simplifies the automation of repetitive tasks, freeing up developers' time to focus on other tasks
• Improves application performance and reliability by automating tasks that need to run on a schedule
• Enables better resource utilization by automating tasks during off-peak hours
• Provides flexibility and customization options to meet a variety of use cases and requirements

Use cases:

• E-commerce: automate daily inventory updates, order processing, and shipping notifications
• Finance: schedule automated billing, generate reports, and process payments
• Healthcare: schedule patient appointment reminders and medication refill reminders
• IT and DevOps: automate server backups, log file cleaning, and system monitoring.

Security

Altogic's security feature includes a variety of tools to help developers secure their applications. The feature supports encryption, access control, and threat detection, among other security measures. The feature offers a highly secure environment for applications, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. In addition to the features mentioned above, Altogic also provides several security controls to protect applications from malicious users or attackers.

• API keys are used to authenticate requests made to Altogic APIs. They are unique to each application and user, and are required to access Altogic resources. Client library keys are also used for authentication, but are used by applications running on the client-side to access server-side resources. These keys are unique to each application and user, and can be revoked or rotated as needed.

• Session tokens are used to authenticate users who are logged into your application. These tokens are generated when a user logs in, and expire after a certain amount of time. They are used to identify the user and allow them to access protected resources.

• Role-based access controls (RBAC) are used to restrict access to resources based on the user's role. Roles can be assigned to users or groups, and are used to determine what actions a user can perform and what resources they can access.

• Rate limiting is used to prevent Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. It restricts the number of requests that can be made to an application in a given amount of time, preventing overload and ensuring the application remains available to users.

• Authorized domains are used to restrict access to resources to specific domains or IP addresses. This is useful when an application needs to restrict access to certain resources, such as an API, to specific clients or servers.

• Object level security allows you to restrict access to specific objects within your database or storage bucket. This is useful when an application needs to restrict access to sensitive data, such as user passwords or financial information.

By implementing these security features, Altogic provides a robust and secure platform for building and deploying applications, helping to protect against common security threats and keep your applications and users safe.

Conclusion

By offering these features, Altogic enables developers to create highly scalable and performant applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. The platform is highly versatile, and can be used for a wide range of use cases, such as e-commerce, finance, healthcare, and more. With Altogic, developers can focus on creating innovative and engaging applications, while leaving the infrastructure management to the platform.

In conclusion, Altogic offers a powerful platform for building highly scalable and performant applications. Its features cover all the essential aspects of application development, such as authentication, real-time updates, business logic, serverless functions, message queues, databases, caching, storage, cron-jobs, and security.