This week, San Francisco-based startup FatFractal emerged from stealth mode to announce the availability of a cloud-based Backed as a Service (BaaS) that provides an engine-driven platform for application development with an array of differentiating features. FatFractal’s key differentiator is the way its patent-pending architecture allows developers access to its backend configuration, thereby allowing for customization of the backend environment that correspondingly gives developers greater control and possibilities for deployment optimization.
Kevin Nickels, President of FatFractal, remarked on FatFractal’s backend transparency as follows:
The Backend as a Service (BaaS) companies provide an instant datastore but the backends they provide are mostly black boxes to application developers. FatFractal gives developers easy access and control over their backends offering productivity improvements of up to 70 percent for applications with complex backend requirements, significantly improving time to market and lowering the cost of development.
FatFractal’s ability to grant developers the opportunity to view and configure its backend is likely to sit well with developers that may benefit from quickly tweaking a backend configuration as opposed to spending significant amounts of time writing code that faces the constraint of conforming to a static, “black box” backend environment. Additionally, FatFractal delivers an instant backend that dynamically understands the data structure specific to an application. Developers can also map customized schemas to backend data stores using the FatFractal Definition Language.
Like most Backend as a Service vendors, FatFractal’s platform provides all apps with an instant, customizable, REST API, over the wire transmission of object information using JSON/HTTP, and inherent authentication to login and logout for user and group objects. Moreover, FatFractal boasts enterprise-grade declarative security, datagraph functionality to model complex, many to many relationships in a NoSQL datastore, and the ability to operate locally on any infrastructure that supports JVM and deploy to the cloud with a single command.
Pricing is highly competitive given that the Silver Tier services are free during FatFractal’s public beta. Proposed pricing at the Platinum level offers unlimited domains, 25 million API requests, 30 GB of storage, 25 GB of outgoing bandwidth and unlimited incoming bandwidth. FatFractal competes with the likes of Parse, Kinvey, CloudMine and StackMob, but is not exclusively dedicated to mobile application development like some of its BaaS competitors.
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