Parse never made sense to me.<p>I could see a service like Parse being useful, but it would need to be owned / operated by a nonprofit in order to gain any adoption. Otherwise, it's just another proprietary platform that will get shut off or changed once Facebook (or whoever) pivots to another business model to address that market. There's certainly demand, but I think most developers are wary about putting their company's tech stack at the mercy of a profit-driven company that may abandon them.<p>In the end though, I just don't think Parse offered enough over existing solutions like AWS and Azure. Both those ecosystems can easily scale from low-end mobile apps (like Parse was designed for) or huge enterprise apps.<p>It also didn't help that Facebook was unable to onboard a single major IoT vendor onto Parse - IMO this was probably the reason they ended up killing it. If there was zero interest from existing players in the industry, they may have figured there's not much of a market there.
Yeah, it sucks Parse shut down. But that's not an argument to avoid SaaS. My startup is built on over 20+ different third-party tools. It will really, really suck if any of them shut down... but I'd rather deal with that possibility in the future when we have more money and time, than struggle to build everything out ourselves now.<p>Like I said, it sucks Parse is shutting down. But in ~2 hours, you can get the open source Parse clone they released going and be back to new. Seems better to deal with that now than to have slowed down initial development by building everything in-house.
Sometimes I really feel like I'm falling behind the times because I don't use a lot of third party services or platforms for my company's apps. I feel like I stick with simple tools at the expense of not getting any "good stuff" for free.<p>When something like this shutdown occurs though it makes me glad that I can just spin up a plain old server or two and put together whatever services that I need. I can't tell if I'm a dinosaur or a maverick!
Click-bait speculation.<p>Word in the industry was that after two failed attempts to move from AWS to Facebooks metal failed spectacularly and massive attrition after vesting -- no one was left to make it work and Facebook lost the will to keep going.<p>The more important lesson was that a failure to port a stack from AWS to FB servers caused Facebook to take a $1B write-down. Startups should reconsider their metal, as future acquirers will likely heed this lesson strongly.
For what it's worth (and because someone said they were "hoping for an insider leak"), here's what a genuine insider had to say about this article:<p><i>Just awful.</i><p>followed by:<p><i>I would write something but it would be so simplistic that nobody would believe it.</i><p>Sorry it's anonymous, but it's the best I could squeeze out of them :)
>Can you trust your platform of choice, or will they close shop on you tomorrow?<p>I'm thinking about moving to IBM BlueMix with parts of my business and asking myself the same question. What do you guys think? Will BlueMix still be there in a couple of years (3,4)? I know nobody using it, but IBM is promoting it quite aggressively, and it makes sense for me to have an alternative for both self-made AWS clusters (IaaS) AND BaaS like Parse.
There's also <a href="http://www.28.io" rel="nofollow">http://www.28.io</a> (totally ungooglable name, btw. Also know as "28msec").<p><a href="http://www.28.io/documentation/latest/data-sources/" rel="nofollow">http://www.28.io/documentation/latest/data-sources/</a><p>Not really comparable to Parse, even though they call it "Virtual Databases". Sure, you can query everything, but what about updates?<p>EDIT: Looks like they have updates, but I couldn't find whether they support similar uniform interface to updates as they have for queries (ideally XQuery Update Facility).<p><a href="http://www.28.io/documentation/latest/modules/connectors" rel="nofollow">http://www.28.io/documentation/latest/modules/connectors</a>
> Large mobile app developers such as mobile gaming companies mostly shunned its service, building in house custom solutions instead. Small to medium sized developers embraced its service, but had a much smaller propensity to spend.<p>As a developer, I want the platform I choose to rely on to be reliable and unlikely to shut down. I also don't want to spend a lot of money on it. Hmm. Hmmmmmm.
I still see a big market for a more powerful Parse. I think the whole "infrastructure as a service" is now commodity and wouldn't be a good competitive advantage, but the software orchestrating all the sys admin stuff on top of <i>any</i> IoT would be of tremendous value. The perfect solution would connect all the great open-source building blocks into one "Good Enough Way". I would totally pay for that, but I don't see how that service would stop copycats. In a way, this is what Meteor is trying to get to. Embrace open-source but deal and charge for the hard parts that nobody else is solving.<p>Ideally, there would be a generalized way to build scalable applications. Similarly to how mostly everyone got behind React, it would be great to have mostly everyone behind such a project. I'm sure it will happen, but I'm not sure when it will. Right now there are hundreds of new libraries in the JS ecosystem, but there are some clear converging trends. I think new languages and libraries will always exist and be welcome, but it'd be great to have one standard way based on years of experience. Similar to how other industries stabilized (i.e. building bridge). I feel we'll be able to move so much faster when we get to that point. Now, every programmer is reinventing the wheel and keep doing the same mistakes that other programmers elsewhere are doing.
Outsourcing functionality or work makes a lot of sense for things that aren't core to your business. If you're building a web or mobile app, backend services should be core to your business.<p>It's a very different thing to write a web application or web services that can run on many hosting platforms than to give responsibility for your entire backend to a service provider.
Interesting thought. In fact when I looked at the market of mBaaS, it is interesting that most major competitors after Parse target the Entreprise market, that echo with your 2nd checkbox.
They bought parse at a time when Facebook was struggling to do mobile right. Parse had the talent. That was my initial thought when the acquisition went down.