Elevator Pitch
Looking for a free solution to build a simple, serverless backend quickly? You can Google that (no, really)! This talk will cover creating a free REST API using Google Apps Script, along with leveraging Google Sheets as a simple database, message queue and logging solution and caveats involved.
Description
Did you know that you can create simple, serverless backends with a free Gmail account? Combining Google Apps Script and Google Sheets opens up some free and fun opportunities to do just that! Building a REST API should be something that you can build and test against without worrying about shutting a server down or cleaning up resources after you are done using them for the day.
During this session, we will cover:
- Setting up a simple REST API with Google Apps Script
- Adding a Google Sheet as a message queue, flat database, and logging solution
- Caveats to this approach that may contradict usability
Notes
As a constant hunter of free solutions for problems that usually cost some amount of money to solve, I feel others would benefit from learning about this approach to creating easy serverless backends without fear of incurring costs when breaking out of “free tier” resources. I personally have used this approach when developing the Google Chat backend for PoshBot and found it incredibly handy to have, especially when avoiding other solutions due to potential cost.