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Pristine is a fast and lightweight serverless framework packed with enterprise level features.

Our mission: Build a full-fledge framework that has the lowest possible minimal footprint.

Description

Pristine is a Typescript framework for NodeJS that is extremely lightweight with a very low number of external dependencies. It is crucial for Pristine to have the lowest impact on Cold starts in order to be successful in a Serverless (or FaaS) environment. And you know what? We did it!

Pristine offers incredible performance and packs all the features you would expect from a full-fledge framework:

  • Authentication
  • Authorization
  • Configuration
    • AWS SSM
    • Code based
    • Configuration files
    • Environment variables
  • Dependency Injection (powered by TSyringe)
  • Events
  • Http Client
  • Logging
  • Scheduling
  • Tracing
  • Validation
  • plus... SO MANY first party modules of popular Cloud Services (Auth0, AWS, Azure, Cloudflare, GCP, Firebase, Sentry, Stripe, etc..)

Philosophy

Pristine is inspired by the very popular and honestly amazing Typescript framework named NestJS. We are big fans of NestJS. However, NestJS is quite slow to start at first and cannot be easily bundled Source. We told ourselves, what if we could use all the features we love from NestJS, while ensuring a fast initialization to minimize impacts on the cold starts.

So, we set out to do just that.

Why bother you might ask?

The biggest benefit of this approach is the performance gain you get when you host your code as a Function as a Service (FaaS) provider. In the Serverless world, being coupled with a Http Server is major handicap.

In a Function as a Service(FaaS) world, the Cloud providers all have builtin mechanisms to transform Http requests into binary objects, compatible with the runtime language of the function, that can be used directly in the code without any further transformation.

Unfortunately, most NodeJS frameworks are not built with a Serverless first mentality and can only handle Http requests by starting a Http Server. Yes, this means that in order to handle the Javascript object passed to your function, you have to convert it again from a Javascript object to a Http Request.

When you think about it for a second, it doesn't make sense. The Cloud Infrastructre provides you with a Request object, why not use it directly?

Starting another Http Server means that you are doing the same work twice. This results in this inefficient process:

Http Client ---> Cloud --> Function Invocation (with Request object) --> Start local Http Server --> Convert request as Http Request --> Send to local Http Server --> Traditional NodeJS frameworks transform the Http Request into a Request object --> NodeJS frameworks handles the request.

Pristine doesn't work like that. Because it isn't coupled with a specific Http Server, Pristine expects its own Request format. This means that we only have to map the Cloud's request object into Pristine's.

As you can start to understand, this also means that we can easily map any Http Server's requests into a Pristine Request object. Mapping between two objects is always faster than starting a full-fledge Http Server and then converting it again twice.

Therefore, Pristine's process is much simpler and much faster: Http Client ---> Cloud --> Function Invocation (with Request object) --> Cloud Specific Request Mapper --> Pristine

What about cold starts?

If you are familiar with FaaS, you are definitely familiar with the concept of cold starts.

A cold start refers to the first instantiation of a function. Behind the scenes, depending on the implementation, the Cloud Provider has to quickly launch a container (or a NodeJS process in the case of CloudFlare Workers) and set it up properly (networking, attached disks, etc..) before serving the request.

After the first launch, the Cloud Providers usually keep your functions "warm", meaning they keep the containers running. This means that during the next execution, you won't incur a cold start latency.

Reducing the cold start latency is a very important topic for the adoption of FaaS.

Additionally, not increasing the cold start is important. This last sentence is precisely the goal we had when building Pristine:

Building a lightweight full-fledge framework that has a minimal impact on cold starts when being ran in FaaS while being as efficient in traditional hosting.

This is great, but I don't want to use Serverless

No worries. That's why we built it to be very decoupled. Therefore, hosting it in a traditional http server won't incur a performance hit.

Out of the box support from all these third party services (new services added monthly):

Pristine comes out of the box with support from these third party services:

Coming soon:

Side note here, this list doesn't mean that Pristine is NOT compatible with the following third party services. Pristine is extensible so you can easily integrate any libraries. This list simply means that the out of the box support is not yet available.

  • GraphQL
  • MongoDB
  • Kafka

Hosting

The Pristine framework is built for Serverless first. We put a lot of efforts in reducing the cold start as much as we can such that the instantation process of the Kernel is very quick (look at the performance tests to see for yourself how fast Pristine can be instantiated with 200 controllers and 1000 of http routes).

That being said, Pristine plays very nicely with the following NodeJS servers:

In fact, your business logic with Pristine is 100% decoupled from how it is hosted (serverless or not). Therefore, Pristine is compatible with every NodeJS server technologies.

Summary

Pristine is an extremely light framework with very minimal dependencies. Pristine can be used in a serverless context where having a very fast cold start is necessary. The instantiation process is very quick.

The term pristine inspires the code in this framework to be pristine: clear and concise.

Pristine is built with the strong opinion that your business logic should be 100% agnostic from how it is hosted. Most NodeJS frameworks share this same mentality. However, Pristine does it differently. Instead of being tightly coupled with a Http Server, Pristine is entirely decoupled from how it is hosted.

To do so, Pristine encapsulates its own Request object. Then, you choose the Http Server you want to use and if we haven't done it for you already (we try to do it for each available http server), you map the HTTP Server's request object to Pristine's.

How to begin?

We encourage you to take a look at the Getting Started documentation for your first steps.

References

Next: Getting Started