Hubs - Introduction

Hubs is the next generation of always-on, high-performance cloud functions.

Hubs is a paradigm shift in how we think about organizing and accessing APIs and Databases in a wide array of applications.

The legacy approach of using technologies like Express.js to spend hours building a backend API simply to fetch, update, and/or delete data from a running database is long, arduous, and completely unnecessary.

Hubs organizes collections of database connections, API requests, and database queries in a brilliantly easy-to-use user interface, which can all then be instantly deployed as Special Purpose Cloud Functions.

Special Purpose Cloud Functions™

Use Special Purpose Cloud Functions™ (SPFs) to revolutionize your development pipeline.

As we've written about on our blog, SPFs are a radical improvement over legacy cloud Edge Functions.

By removing the suboptimal developer experience and clunky deployment flows that often leave large disconnects between local development and production, Hubs SPFs make adding database or API calls a breeze in any use case or situation.

Internally and in our documentation, you may see SPFs referred to simply as "queries". At their highest level of abstraction, that is largely what they are: Cloud "queries" that are especially good at fetching data while simultaneously freeing you from managing infrastructure, deployment, and code.

Configuration

Configuring SPFs is simple, intuitive, and done through the Hubs UI.

Simply write your query, or configure your HTTP Request, test it in the UI to validate the results, and then deploy.

Usage

Upon deployment, each SPF is given a globally unique id. For example: nk.q.1jdfDaxa2iuytEafe1. Once your query id is generated, you can use it to make any API call, or with our SDKs.

For example, in the context of our javascript SDK, you can execute your function like so:

 const { data, error } = await nokori.query.execute({
  		queryId: 'nk.q.1jdfDaxa2iuytEafe1'
		}
  )

Usage - With Context

SPFs also support passing context objects (as seen in the screenshot above) to pass dynamic data to your configured cloud functions at execution time.

For example, using our javascript SDK again:

 const { data, error } = await nokori.query.execute({
      queryId: 'nk.q.1jdfDaxa2iuytEafe1',
      context: {
        userId: '8675309'
      }
    }
  )

Support Data Sources

Hubs supports connections to any HTTP API and a growing number of the world's most popular databases.

For a full list, see Support Sources

Conclusion

Special Purpose Cloud Functions have a wide array of use cases, but all share the same core value propositions: no infrastructure to manage, low or no code, no cold starts, and no concurrency limits or management.

SPFs can be executed or used via API anywhere, and are extremely powerful when combined with AI generation and Question-Answer services.