There’s often much more to mobile development projects than creating the app that users will ultimately run on their devices. Many services require the support of backend infrastructure to handle certain advanced operations, which can increase overhead a great deal.

Realm Inc. is tackling the issue by rolling out a new service today that removes the need to manually set up and maintain a server-side environment. Realm Functions, as it’s called, is a cloud-based engine for running code that only requires developers to supply the core application logic. The underlying infrastructure is hidden behind an abstraction layer.

It’s similar to what Amazon Web Services Inc. offers with its Lambda service, which was one of the very first so-called serverless compute services, in which the cloud computing provider handles server management, at the time of its launch two years ago. Other major providers such as Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. have since joined the fray as well with rival offerings. 

What sets Realm Functions apart is that it’s integrated into the Realm Mobile Platform. Launched earlier this year, the offering is a backend as a service toolkit designed to power apps that use the startup’s flagship mobile database. Running code on the platform should be more convenient than using Lambda or some other third-party service that requires extra work to incorporate into a project.

Since ease-of-use is the whole reason why serverless compute services have become so popular, this benefit could give Realm Functions a valuable edge. The offering complements the already extensive set of features that Realm Mobile Platform provides to ease mobile projects. The toolkit can automate user authentication, conflict resolution and many of the other tasks involved in moving data from an app to a backend environment.

The platform’s appeal, and by extension that of Realm Functions, is admittedly limited to developers who use the startup’s mobile database, but this group constitutes a massive market. Apps based on Realm have been downloaded more than a billion times to date and counting, which has helped the startup become the largest independent mobile database provider. Notable users include Netflix Inc., Starbucks Corp. and SAP SE, which recently struck a far-reaching partnership with Apple Inc. to develop business apps for iOS.

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