Which Back End Should I Use As A Front-End Developer?
Fitri Aulia Permatasari
Choosing a service to store data can be confusing and overwhelming for a front-end developer. What are all these acronyms? Are the Amazon services named strange on purpose? These and many other questions await your journey into the back-end. As a front-end developer turned full-stack, I've spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to figure out the backend. Because the backend is harder to visualize, I struggled to understand how the pieces fit together. Luckily, I soon found out I wasn't alone. There's a support group when confused front-end engineers meet called Twitter. Consider this article a "choose your own adventure" piece. I'll ask questions about your requirements and then present a few options. Before we can begin our journey, I must first explain the basics. You can also jump to the list of services directly. ## Table of Contents - Backend Basics - Do You Even Need a Database? - Low Code Solutions - Terms To Understand - SQL / NoSQL - GraphQL / REST - Authentication / Authorization - Hosted / Self-Hosted - Serverless - Data Modeling - Levels of Abstraction - List of Services - Backend (as a Service) - Supabase - Hasura - Build Your Own Backend - Prisma - Should You Use a CMS? - Starting From Scratch - Conclusion / Resources ## Backend Basics What is this scary place, the back-end? You can boil it down to this: - You need a place to store data (database) - You need a method of retrieving the data (API)