A Switch to MongoDB Stitch
Day 1: On the corner of Switch & Serverless
I have been both a big fan and an evangelist of the lambda architecture for some time now. I have used it on a few projects at this point with positive results and there’s not much for me to gripe about. I almost exclusively used Lambda on Amazon AWS and didn’t try much else.
AWS is, for the most part, a great solution to building enterprise-class applications with both hosted and/or provisioned resources. A noted exception is using MongoDB and Serverless. Since AWS doesn’t have a hosted solution for MongoDB, using it can feel a bit contrived. You essentially have to provision your own cluster or call a third-party hosted service like Atlas.
I decided to try MongoDB Stitch. Stitch more or less behaves in a manner similar to Lambda on AWS and runs on AWS infrastructure. The main difference is integration with Mongo with out-of-the-box middleware and authentication solutions.
I opened the Stitch documentation and started to play around. I was surprised at how simple it was to get started. I had a fully working authentication flow within minutes and I was writing functions shortly thereafter. I am, so far, quite impressed with what I see. I plan to follow up this article with a detailed tutorial and some screenshots and a list of advantages and disadvantages vs AWS Lambda/DynamoDB and other serverless solutions like Netlify.