People always ask us for the meaning behind the name “FatFractal”, so we decided to write a blog post about it!
We wondered, “why is it so difficult for developers, like us, to find a platform that makes it easy to create compelling apps with a cloud backend?”
The Backbone of FatFractal -
We could not find an end-to-end solution with everything we needed: native code support for any connected device, an events model, declarative security, custom code and all of those things integrated as lightweight services. Everything had to be elegant, easy-to-use, intuitive and delightful.
The underlying platform needed to be engine-based for dynamic scaling, to support any infrastructures, to have a published services model and to be able to support any languages, backend and frontend. We liked developing on local machines and insisted on deploying to the cloud without reconfiguration. And we wanted it all to be boilerplate free and reasonably priced.
Since we couldn’t find it, we built it -
When we named the company FatFractal, we had in mind the intersection of the exploding mobile apps space, our technology platform and the cloud. The heart of our platform is a small, simple engine. Since all applications, modules, components and services on the platform have FatFractal engines at their core, some techie-types might call the resulting topology a fabric.
The reason behind the name -
The metaphor we like best is the fractal: the engines at the heart of services are self-similar, components that replicate and scale in a fractal-like pattern. As the fabric expands, emergent properties of the system can be both surprising and compelling. As apps, services, components, threads and IaaS’s are added in, that fractal-like fabric scales fast, getting as vast–or as compact–as it needs. We continue to believe that the cloud is more like a fractal than a…um…cloud.
Hence, the name: FatFractal