The simplest serverless platform is here: Catalyst announces public availability

We're thrilled to announce the official launch of Catalyst, Zoho's serverless platform. Having debuted in 2019 as an early-access version, Catalyst now offers cutting-edge serverless capabilities to quickly build and deploy innovative microservices, apps, and serverless product extensions.

The platform has grown beyond serverless computing services to become a comprehensive serverless developer suite, with more than 30 individual components that ensure seamless development and deployment of the solutions. With Catalyst, you can quickly build and scale solutions for your business without having to manage any servers. Catalyst comes with transparent, uncomplicated pricing, unlike other cloud providers where read-write units have to be pre-provisioned. With Catalyst, resource requests are the main marker for pricing. You only pay for the resources you use. Even better, you get up to 125 million free invocations.*

 Reduce cost, speed up go-to-market, and enable delightful customer experiences with Catalyst

What are some of the key features you should look for in Catalyst?

➤ Event-driven functions, REST endpoints, and CRON jobs

➤ Powerful function orchestration for seamless business logic

➤ Integrated database, file storage, and cache unit built on the platform

➤ Off the shelf automated machine learning and artificial intelligence integrated with the platform and the necessary application services, such as user management, API gateway, monitoring, user authentication, and email services, are integrated into the platform

➤ Free developer sandbox environment  for testing out your applications before pushing the project to production

Helping developers focus on writing codes rather than running it

Imagine this: Matt is a junior developer who has been assigned the task of creating microservices that serve as product extensions to an existing application used by his agency's customers. The customer wants Matt to turn around with a finished solution in just a week.

Think this sounds difficult? That's where Catalyst comes in it! Here's how Catalyst makes this task a cinch! Matt can easily make a breakthrough in his projects by creating microservices, and even end-to-end applications with a set of integrated components that can help run the applications easily. With Catalyst's natively-integrated and ready-to use components, he can easily deliver it in a week—and meet the customer's expectations. 

Catalyst is the simplest serverless platform available. Our simplified pricing, effortless database provisioning, unified and free sandbox, and no YAML make Catalyst the easiest platform to quickly build and deploy serverless apps that auto-scale on low-cost and next-gen cloud infrastructure. 

To learn why Catalyst is your best bet for serverless projects, read this. Don't just take our word for it! See for yourself what one of our early customers had to say about the ease of use of our serverless platform.

"I am not an experienced software developer, yet I was able to understand and execute the serverless microservice, along with an entry-level developer from my team. We were able deploy the project effortlessly using Catalyst CRON because of the simple-to-use platform approach, proactive technical support, and detailed documentation in their console" - Radha Rengachari, Managing Director, Spikra

Features like Automated Machine Learning and Circuits for functions orchestration can optimize the time and effort involved in development, letting the programmer focus solely on the business logic to deliver the best-in-class solutions. If this sounds intriguing, why not check it out for yourself? Here’s a a quick-start guide to set up Catalyst in under 5 minutes. You can also try this 10 minutes tutorial to build your first serverless web app on Catalyst.

How businesses can benefit from Catalyst?

One of the most frequent pieces of feedback that we get from our customers has been their appreciation of the simplicity of putting together the pieces of the serverless puzzle. With Catalyst, you don't have to spend time contemplating the various storage options and complex component integrations that are usually involved in building serverless solutions in the cloud ecosystem. 

With Catalyst, it's easier to create solutions with minimal effort and time. This can truly catalyze the project implementation and create solid business solutions that can be scaled along with the growth of the business.

This means it takes less effort and time for companies to build, test, and implement projects in the Catalyst ecosystem. This has already proved to be cost effective and efficient for most of our customers. 

"We were able use the Catalyst serverless platform to build quickly and deploy a cloud-based job evaluation portal that has greatly improved the reach of our solution among the job-seeking community. We're highly impressed with the technical support offered by the Catalyst team, and the robustness of the platform that's housing our crucial application. We outgrew what the server world offered to, us and it was the right time for us to switch over to a provider like Catalyst.” – NJ Lakshmi Narayan, Founder and Director, BuildHr

Read the case study

Perfect start for businesses of all sizes

From startups to SMBs and enterprises, organizations of all sizes love Catalyst. Catalyst has been instrumental in helping startups build and scale faster through quick product development and deployment. Enterprises have been able to adopt the microservice architecture iteratively to improve observability and ease of debugging. 

Catalyst and Start-ups

One of our customers, an e-commerce retail start-up from India named Clean Label, was able to pull off the deployment of a serverless application within about three months time. Learn how the sustainable e-commerce start- up achieved maximum efficiency with minimal time and effort using Catalyst.

"Being a startup, we've been highly impressed with the tech support and customization that Catalyst was able to bring to the table allowing us to achieve our goals in an effortless way. The solution built on Catalyst was a smart and logical integration with Zoho Inventory that helped us minimize data redundancies, maximize efficiency, and create a seamless and sustainable storage container recycling system."

- Shyam Sundar, CEO - Clean Label

Catalyst and SMBs: Catalyst has all the components required to build a full fledged serverless application for SMBs. This can be a great way to cut down mounting server space and management costs and instead focus on delighting customers with superior experiences. 

Product Extensions and Microservices:  In most cases of rigid cloud software, customers might look for a product extension or a microservice that can add value through external APIs. You can build numerous product extensions and microservices.

Catalyst and Enterprises: Catalyst can boost the bottom line of enterprises with optimized server management costs and manpower hours. 

What's new for you

1. Free Sandbox Having a sandbox environment to test out your applications and perfect them is the best scenario a programmer could ask for. Catalyst primarily focuses on optimizing the efforts of developers by creating an ecosystem that offers flexibility for experimentation and robustness for hosting serverless applications. 
2. Catalyst is a perfect serverless ecosystem with the right set of tools, literature, and free sandbox environment, which is not only cost effective, but also improves the efficiency of the projects. 
3. New Data Centers: In addition to the US DC, Catalyst has launched dedicated data centers for Europe and India. Customers can now choose the DC of their choice to build and host their serverless apps.

Hop over here for all the latest updates

Catalyst for Zoho Ecosystem 

Building microservices and extensions for Zoho's SaaS products has been one of the key highlights for our early customers and partners. Zoho Partners were able to create in-product customizations using Catalyst that helped to align their business use case with the existing Zoho services. For example: our customer ConstructionBOS used Catalyst to integrate data from third-party web applications into Zoho CRM to drive real-time data access and management to address their customers requirements. 

"With Catalyst, we were able to serve our customers better by getting new services to them faster. Building the microservice on Catalyst was easy! We never had to deal with infrastructure management. We just wrote a code and deployed it."

—Craig Mulcahy, CEO, ConstructionBOS

 Read the case study

Platform Highlights: 

Unlike the first-generation hyperscale serverless platforms, Catalyst offers significant advantage for developers with some of the following functionalities:

•  Intuitive UI and easy to code framework offers effortless development and deployment of applications and microservices. For example, adding user management with support for Zoho and GSuite single sign-on is as simple as copying and pasting a few lines of code into the application code. This significantly reduces developer overhead and accelerates deployment time. 
• While a developer typically incurs DevOps overhead in using database or cloud storage in the serverless compute offered by hyperscale providers, Catalyst completely removes this DevOps overhead and makes it easy for developers to use these services to build their applications. 
• Automated ML and AI engines integrated with the Catalyst platform makes it easy for developers to build AI applications without having to train the model first. Take advantage of Zoho's Intelligent Assistant (Zia), which offers simple REST APIs that can help you save significant time and overhead in deploying these applications. 
• The website hosting feature allows developers to build an entire web application and deploy it on the Catalyst platform. 

• Autoscaling in Catalyst: Unlike server-dependent applications, serverless applications on Catalyst can be auto scaled depending on the load and you do not have to worry about the server provisioning from your end. 
•  Readily available mobile and web SDKs
• CI/CD pipeline, versioning tools, and Github integration for continuous development and deployment. 

• Catalyst follows an event-driven and asynchronous approach towards computing. This helps to save time and improve efficiency.        

Why should you choose Catalyst?

• Pay nothing till you deploy the project to production

• Get up to 125 million free invocations* 

• Get pre-built microservices to slash development time

• Decoupled environments for CI/CD. Best of all, the local debugging and development sandbox environments are completely free. 

• Transparent, uncomplicated pricing, unlike other cloud providers where read-write units have to be pre-provisioned. With Catalyst, resource requests are the main marker for pricing. You only pay for the resources you use.

• Perform advanced AI tasks easily leveraging powerful APIs built over years of our research.

• Zoho's promise of privacy. We own the tech stack completely, so your applications will run on the reliable infrastructure that powers 40+ Zoho applications.

• The all-in-one suite: Catalyst is the only serverless platform with multiple components integrated into a single stack, which helps to save the time and effort needed to build serverless applications.
• Free sandbox: Catalyst provides a free sandbox environment for you to try any serverless application and microservice, free of cost. You can use all the components available on the platform to build your dream project. You'll be charged only post-deployment, based on usage.
• User-friendly pricing: You will only be charged based on the number of calls per Catalyst component and function execution time after the project is moved to production. If you have Catalyst credits, they will be deducted automaticallybased on the usage of any component in the platform. Try the Catalyst pricing calculator to understand our pricing method. 
• No prior training needed: Unlike complex cloud platforms, a developer is not required to go through training and certifications to get started with serverless computing on Catalyst. You can just sign up and start building your serverless applications.
• No forceful sign ups: You don't have to sign up to data centers or use your credit card to sign up to our server hosting services in order to get started with Catalyst. Catalyst offers exclusive serverless computing experience. All you have to do is sign up to our serverless platform and start using the components to build your apps. 

5k+ users and partners are on Catalyst already.  50+ Zoho products  are hosted on the same infrastructure. 

Serverless computing with Catalyst is a cakewalk. 

Start building today

Note: *Free for the first year upon deploying your first project to production and considering single credit operations like Select Query in DataStore and heavy usage pricing