Postlight Chooses Netlify to Power Mercury's Decoupled API Platform
Lead Engineer Adam Pash and the Postlight team built Mercury's decoupled frontend on Netlify to unify multiple backend APIs running on AWS Lambda and Elastic Beanstalk. Using Netlify's proxy rules, they created a seamless interface for API key provisioning while maintaining complete architectural independence.
What is it?
Mercury the app consists of two important API endpoints for users: The Mercury Web Parser and the Mercury AMP Converter.
Each of these endpoints are running on a completely different stack. The Mercury Web Parser is written in node.js and runs on AWS using a combination of API Gateway and Lambda (built and deployed using Serverless). The Mercury AMP Converter is written in Python and runs on Elastic Beanstalk. We wanted to create a front end that allowed users to sign up for the Mercury APIs and provision API keys that ran independently of our APIs. Netlify was a great option for doing just that.
Why Netlify?
Netlify’s redirect and rewrite rules were one of the biggest draws to Netlify for this project. As I said, we wanted a decoupled front end that allowed us to proxy requests to our APIs. Netlify rewrite rules allowed us to do that quickly and easily.
Favorite Feature?
Netlify’s support has been fantastic. Whenever I ran into a problem (which, inevitably, was of my own doing), I’d contact support and have a response in minutes that explained and solved my problem.
| Netlify Features Used | Tools & Frameworks Used |
|---|---|
| Redirect Rules | Webpack |
| Rewrite Rules | Babel |
| Proxy Rules | Phenomic |
| Domain Aliases | React |
| CLI | PostCSS |
| HTTPS | CSS modules |
| Tachyons | |
| Firebase | |
| Serverless | |
| AWS Lambda | |
| Elastic Beanstalk | |
| GitHub |