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Now API — Instant serverless Node.JS deployments with an API.
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@rauchg I have been using 'now' for a little while now on small projects and I love it! Now I wan't to use it for a bigger startup-y like project and have two questions. Is 'now' mean't to be a platform that a potentially big product can be launched on? And is there a recommended cloud database provider to use along side 'now'? I was hoping to use Google's Datastore. I'm super excited about your product and I apologize if those are painfully obvious questions! Thanks for any info.
@datandyk
Absolutely. Our main focus is on scalability and geographical distribution, for which there are some amazing news and technical demonstrations coming.
As far as the database provider, it very much depends on the specific needs of the application (or part of the application)!. As an example, if you need basic data manipulation and caching, Redis Labs is easy to set up, replicate, and they can collocate to many different locations.
@rauchg thanks so much! I plan on signing up for your premium plan soon. If you don't mind answering one more question: is there a way to make use of your 'micro' web framework on now? As in dynamically using multiple micro deploys for an internal API on now. Maybe your new mix API enables this?
@datandyk at the moment, you can deploy each micro(1) API service independently. We'll soon blog about different ways of routing traffic to them from a single host, which will make your frontends more efficiently in terms of simultaneous HTTP connections.
@tehsuck No, and for more details I actually address this in the FAQ (https://zeit.co/now#faq/why-not-...).
The bottom line is: the "cloud functions" approach will always require that you somehow expose them with an HTTP layer on top.
If you're familiar with AWS, you can think of Now as Lambda + API Gateway, but without any of the proprietary terminology or code.
What this means for you: if your `package.json` runs in your local computer and it has a `start` script that serves HTTP traffic, your application works with us.
The kicker: we expose your traffic with HTTP/2 load-balancers, which means your client side applications (like mobile apps) will make highly efficient use of the network.
@fanghai44 we're introducing a new command for this called `alias`.
Aliases accomplish two things in the context of now. One is obviously a memorable shortcut (qiming.now.sh or qiming.com).
But aliasing is also how zero-downtime deployments happen. Let's say you want to update the code of qiming.com, which is pointing to a specific version of your site. You make changes, and you provision a new unique and different now URL. When you're done testing it or happy with where it's at (having received feedback from your team, for example), you then change the pointer of qiming.com to the new version!
This is really great. Excited to see it can easily host static sites as well: https://zeit.co/now#faq/host-static
@mattcoleman yep! The cool thing is `now-serve` is 100% independent of `now` as a codebase, and is open source (https://github.com/zeit/now-serve).
This really shows the power of programmatic deployment / APIs!
Love it! Brilliant approach to the cloud market. Any plans to cover other platforms/languages with the same API?
I've been using Now for a while and it's one of the greatest Ops/Devops products I've ever used! It makes it simple to deploy an app not having to worry about it scaling up or down. Buying domains through the CLI is just a seamless, while it still allows for DNS record changes
Pros:Easy Docker / Node / Static Deployments, Pretty much instant, Auto Scaling is great
Cons:Maybe not as fast as Netlify, but that's a lot to ask for
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