Introduction to Catalyst by Zoho

Overview

Catalyst by Zoho is a full stack, cloud-based, scalable platform that provides developer functionalities to build software services and applications of any scale in various programming environments. You can build solutions ranging from simple microservices and independent software modules to interactive and dynamic cloud apps, enterprise software, robust business suites, and more for an array of industry verticals, use cases, and requirements. Catalyst is backed by Zoho’s powerful, resilient, tried-and-tested infrastructure that ensures the solutions you build are consistent, reliable, and efficient in their performance, and are highly secure.

Catalyst powers you by providing a host of features through various services, all aimed at providing comprehensive end-to-end support throughout the application building process. You benefit from a platform that offers you the precise tools required to optimize your development, deployment, and post-production phases, enabling you to produce effective business solutions. These server-side programmable services are all available in a unified, accessible, user-friendly interface in a cloud console.

With Catalyst, you get to build solutions in a cost-effective manner by selecting between two different pricing models (a Subscription model or a Pay-as-you-go model) based on your business requirements and usage. You can also utilize free-tiers and benefits that enable you to work with Catalyst for free of cost until you exceed the hard limits imposed on these benefits. This, along with a serverless infrastructure, facilitates optimal cost efficiency with zero downtime.

Ultimately, Catalyst is designed to allow programmers to focus more on designing the user experience and business logic of their serverless applications and solutions, instead of investing time and effort into setting up and maintaining the server-side components. Developers don’t need to build and manage servers or storage solutions manually, or worry about the infrastructure their applications are built on.

You can avail various development tools such as ready-to-use SDKs for a supported programming environment of your choice or RESTful APIs to access various Catalyst components and functionalities. You can also choose to build with Catalyst from your local enviroment with Catalyst CLI, and deploy them to cloud when needed. These developer tools help you customize the already functional server-side behavior to your needs, build on the ready-made components, and seamlessly integrate these backend features into your solutions. Catalyst therefore presents a significantly faster, hassle-free, and cost-effective software development experience.

Catalyst Services

Catalyst by Zoho offers the following services:

1. Catalyst Serverless: Catalyst Serverless is a fully-managed, cloud-computing platform that provides a powerful infrastructure for your application building needs. Catalyst Serverless provides FaaS and PaaS solutions, and supports multiple programming environments.

2. Catalyst Cloud Scale: Catalyst Cloud Scale includes components that enable you to securely build and host robust serverless applications and microservices. You can access end-to-end solutions for your application storage, security, integration, and deployment needs.

3. Catalyst Zia Services: Catalyst Zia Services offer a host of ML and AI-powered microservices that you can readily incorporate in the programming environment of your choice. Catalyst Zia services includes features like OCR, AutoML, Text Analytics, Image Moderation, and more.

4. Catalyst DevOps: Catalyst DevOps enables you to implement a DevOps model in your software building process. This provides components that allow you to operate your code at scale, and perform application monitoring, iterative testing, and quality checks with ease.

5. Catalyst SmartBrowz: Catalyst SmartBrowz allows you to configure and access a headless browser programmatically using popular browser automation libraries. You can crawl and scrape permitted websites, and design templates with dynamic content to generate visual documents of them.

6. Catalyst QuickML: Catalyst QuickML allows you to create machine-learning pipelines with end-to-end solutions in a fully no-code ML pipeline builder service. You can access a host of pre-built ML algorithms, operations, and data preprocessing techniques, and connect with datasets to build ML models.

7. Catalyst ConvoKraft: Catalyst ConvoKraft enables you to build textbased conversational bots that can be embedded into your Catalyst solutions. You can configure tasks for your bot and define the underlying business logic to govern its actions.

Supported Environments

You can develop web and mobile applications using Catalyst and utilize the following SDKs for your needs:

1. Web
2. Android
3. iOS
4. Flutter

Supported Programming Languages and Frameworks

You can develop serverless functions in the following programming languages and frameworks:

1. Java
2. Node.js
3. Python