Nhost Carves a Niche Between Managed Backend and Dev Platform

In the crowded world of backends as a service, Nhost has decided — with apologies to the Grinch’s take on Christmas in Whoville — that a BaaS should be “a little bit more.”

“It’s either you are a BaaS or you are a PaaS, a platform as a service like a Heroku, Render or Railway. You have to make lots of decisions there. You have to write the code, you have to run the code, right?” said Nuno Pato, Nhost co-founder and CEO.

By adding its Nhost Run feature, the company is focusing somewhere in the middle. It’s also adding AI features to make development simpler.

Nhost Run aims to make it easy to extend the Nhost stack to run any custom and third-party open source solutions, in the language of your choice, all in the same place.

“We offer the  convenience of platforms like Firebase, with the customizability of platforms like Render – you get all of the building blocks to get off the ground fast, while keeping the option to customize and extend the software stack with your own services, all running under the same umbrella.” Pato said.

You can integrate with services such as Redis, Memcached, Datadog Agents or MongoDB with your Nhost backend.

Backend Plus the Option to Extend

Pato, who lives in the Azores, began working on Nhost in 2020, through an accelerator program called Antler where he met Johan Eliasson, who originally founded the company in Sweden. As with many companies, it grew out of the founders’ frustration with building the same basic backend services over and over.

“Every time I had to start a new project, I had to do the same things over and over: pick a database, configure it, write code for the API, authentication, storage … those fundamental components that are present in most apps or projects,” he said.

Building the company as an open source serverless backend for web and mobile apps, it joined the field offering alternatives to Google’s Firebase. Under the hood, Nhost offers:

• A Postgres database, in which you can treat the database like a spreadsheet or connect directly to write raw SQL and have full control over it.
• The Hasura GraphQL Engine, open source technology that connects various data stores and auto-generates a GraphQL API, is used for full-text search, event triggers and real-time subscriptions. It enables specific row and column permissions to enable collaboration, yet with controls.
• Authorization for web and mobile apps with FIDO security keys or device biometrics for passwordless or multifactor authentication.
• Hasura storage connects with any S3-compatible storage service.
• Serverless functions that handle custom code in JavaScript and TypeScript with infinite scale. These functions are built for AWS Lambda and deployed in the same AWS region as your backend.
• Nhost also offers a managed cloud.

Nhost integrates with major frontend frameworks such as React, Next.js and Vue.

“We saw that most customers building somewhat sophisticated projects were also running some kind of custom workflow (e.g. machine learning pipelines) in other platforms, and at some point, we just said, ‘Let’s allow these users to bring custom services and extend the Nhost stack, with the same unified experience.” Pato said of the Run feature.

“As your apps grow and evolve, Run ensures that Nhost can scale along with you and your users’ needs.”

It runs everything on Amazon EKS, the managed Kubernetes service from AWS.

New AI Offerings

More recently, Nhost has added vector embeddings to its Postgres offering using pgvector, the open source Postgres extension for similarity search. It also released Auto-Embeddings, using OpenAI to enable queries in natural language plus an easier way to keep embeddings up to date. When there is a change, Auto-Embeddings will regenerate the embeddings and store the new ones in the database so the user does not need to write that code.

Its AI Assistants use ChatGPT, which, along with pre-defined access expressed as GraphQL queries, mutations and/or webhooks can be used for processes involving access to different types of data, with permissions to that data strictly enforced. You can use Assistants to build LLMs using the Nhost knowledge base.

It also has released Graphite, a developer assistant and coding partner. It understands your project’s database and GraphQL schemas to provide context-aware suggestions to make development easier.

In its $3 million seed founding round, led by Nauta Capital, GitHub founders Scott Chacon and Tom Preston-Werner and Netlify founders Christian Bach and Mathias Biilmann Christensen also participated.

Firebase, though a popular way to get started with a project, is proprietary and has spawned a number of open source alternatives, including Supabase, AppWrite, Back4App, Parse, Kinvey, and Kuzzle as well as myriad other proprietary offerings, including AWS Amplify.

Nhost originally thought of Supabase as its closest competitor, according to Pato, but he now says they are too focused on the database while Nhost is trying to carve out a niche with features like Run, software add-ons like Graphite, and platform features like Dedicated Compute, which allows you to allocate CPU and RAM for each service on the Nhost stack, and Service Replicas, multiple concurrent instances of the same service deployed across various machines to eliminate bottlenecks and improve availability and fault tolerance.