Parse is shutting down today

During this year-long shutdown&#x2F;migration process, the open-source and community maintained Parse Server is what most people switched to. Parse is yours now. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ParsePlatform&#x2F;parse-server" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ParsePlatform&#x2F;parse-server</a>

I have seen a fair number of &quot;abrupt&quot; and poorly executed shutdowns on HN over the last few years, and although I don&#x27;t use Parse, I feel as though the team did a good job sunsetting this over the last year. Thank you for the product, the open sourced version, and for not ditching your community! Best of luck to everyone who worked on the team

A little Parse trivia a gathered from talking to (very capable) Parse engineers that now work at FB:<p>- Still the world&#x27;s largest MongoDB user<p>- Had 1M apps, largest one with 40M users<p>- Server was Rails at first (24 threads max. concurrency), later rewritten in Go<p>- &gt;40 MongoDB Replica Sets with 3 nodes each. Storage Engine: RockDB (MongoRocks). No sharding (DB-to-replica-set-mapping). Only instance storage SSDs, no EBS.<p>- Write Concern 1 (!) - some people complained about lost data and stale reads (slave reads were allowed for performance reasons)<p>- Partial updates were problematic as small updates to large docs get &quot;write amplification&quot; when being written to oplog<p>- Experienced frequent (daily) master reelections on AWS EC2. Rollback files were discarded -&gt; data loss<p>- Special flashback tool that recorded workloads that could be rerun for load and functional testing<p>- JS ran in forked V8 engine to enforce 15s execution limit<p>- No sharding automation: manual, error-prone process for largest customers<p>- Indexing not exposed: automatic rule-based generation from slow query logs. Did not work well for larger apps.<p>- Slow queries killed by cron job that polled Mongos currentOp and maintained a limit per API-key + query combination<p>- It was planned to migrate Parse to FB&#x27;s infrastructure but the project was abandoned<p>- Clash of clans used Parse for push notifications and made up roughly half of all pushes<p>I find this extremely interesting, as we are building a BaaS, too, but have a very different approach (Baqend). Coming from a database background, our idea is that developers should know about details such as schemas and indexes (the Parse engineers strongly agreed in hindsight). Also we think that BaaS is not limited to mobile but very useful for the web.<p>Also I think that providers should be open about their infrastructure and trade-offs, which Parse only was after it had already failed.

While the Parse team did an excellent job open-sourcing the platform and providing ample notice, it was still a costly learning experience.<p>Seamlessly transitioning a large user base on iPhone and Android to our self-hosted Parse with minimal service interruption or missed push notifications required significant engineering and coordination. The transition involved more hours than the initial build.<p>While we did our best (email campaigns, push notifications, etc.) we still have a sizable number of users who use the app daily, yet haven&#x27;t updated it and are still pointing to (the old) Parse. We didn&#x27;t plan on Parse going away back then, so those are not graceful failures.<p>Users who did update the app were signed out (couldn&#x27;t maintain the session in the switch), resulting in a lot of &quot;I didn&#x27;t get my forgot password email&quot; questions to support and an unknown number who won&#x27;t bother troubleshooting it.<p>With the information at hand over a year ago, I still would have went with Parse. It really did help us get off the ground quickly. Maybe we would have missed our window of opportunity without it.

I loved Parse from the time I first started using it in college. It started out as a really handy way to spin up small apps quickly so I could start beta testing my app quickly with real users.<p>One of the main problems though was that it really felt like just a prototyping tool to me, and I never really used it for real apps in production.<p>Thus, for my latest project that I&#x27;ve been working on for several months now, I&#x27;ve decided to try in every way to address that problem. I started a company called Scaphold.io (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scaphold.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scaphold.io</a>) and it&#x27;s a GraphQL backend as a service platform. It serves to address many of the same needs of Parse and more. It combines all the best data modeling tools from Parse and real-time capabilities from Firebase to provide a high-fidelity app development experience that you can actually build real production apps on, with as much transparency to your data as possible. That&#x27;s the mission that we have at Scaphold, and I&#x27;m excited to be helping all the stranded app developers out there that were burned by Parse shutting down.<p>Excited to see what comes next for the app development world!

Parse was an amazing discovery when I was just starting out my dev career and I&#x27;ve used it in all of my major projects, but it had some serious shortcomings. I wrote about why I think Parse failed from a developer&#x27;s perspective.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13522602" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13522602</a>

I&#x27;ve spent the last 15 minutes on parse.com, github.com trying to find out what the parse backend actually is. Can someone explain?

This is a real bummer. I am not a programmer by profession (I am a PM), but I took time to learn Parse from scratch to quickly write my own app. I managed to launch my app on App store and everything was well till Parse announced their shutdown. Unfortunately, with a 1 yr old at home and a demanding work &#x2F; commute, I didn&#x27;t really have the time to learn about their migration guidance or educate myself on a new platform. So my App will stop working from today, which is a bummer.<p>For people who are more knowledgeable than me, I was really using Parse as a data store and using their APIs to store and retrieve data. I really liked their visual tools where I can create tables (classes) almost like in an excel document. This meant that I didn&#x27;t have to learn a DB language. Is there a comparable tool that has similar features ? I have looked at Mongolab and Firebase and both seemed a lot more complicated than Parse. Or do I need to learn MongoDb now ?

Found this on the Parse CEO&#x27;s LinkedIn profile[1]:<p>&quot;Facebook acquired the company for ~$100m in April 2013, intending to build a business akin to Amazon Web Services, and we operated for two years as a semi-independent subsidiary.<p>Facebook ultimately chose to exit the hosting business but Parse continues to thrive as an open source project with official support at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, etc.&quot;<p>Was this widely reported? I never knew that the internal plan with FB&#x27;s Parse acquisition was to build an AWS competitor. Kind of interesting!<p>I guess it was viewed as a hedge in case the FB on-platform advertising revenue didn&#x27;t grow as fast as they were predicting.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;ilyasukhar" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;ilyasukhar</a>

A few points on our parse.com and migration to parse-server experience:<p>- I didn&#x27;t like it initially. Not only the name (parse what?) but also because people started using it as a relational storage, which it clearly were not. Later, I became one of them (got convinced by colleagues).<p>- We recommended parse.com to a few clients, and they really enjoyed it.<p>- Had some issues with SDKs but we&#x27;ve been able to workaround them with the help of parse&#x27;s team (pre and post FB acquisition).<p>- When the shutdown news came, that was a crossroad. Open source parse-server had got too many issues and we decided to postpone and not follow the recommended timeline. By august, we decided to stick to the open source version, but still no decision on using a third-party provider for the parse-server, mongodb, both, etc, etc. Also, the providers we had seen then turned the yellow light on due to the shutdown experience. By october, it was decided to follow the dark path of going on our own. For clients, we helped them on specific needs.<p>- The migration consisted of very minor changes in the &quot;cloud code&quot; part, and almost no changes at all to client apps. Difficult part will be to scale our infrastructure when needed.<p>BTW, we finalized the migration of our own app on saturday.

I just want to say thank you to the HN community. We learned a lot in engaging with folks here over the years.

So the alternative options are:<p>- pouchDB - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pouchdb&#x2F;pouchdb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pouchdb&#x2F;pouchdb</a><p>- RxDB - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pubkey&#x2F;rxdb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pubkey&#x2F;rxdb</a><p>- gunDB - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;amark&#x2F;gun" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;amark&#x2F;gun</a><p>- horzion - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rethinkdb&#x2F;horizon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rethinkdb&#x2F;horizon</a><p>- firebase - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;</a>

Thanks to all contributors that made the transition to open-source possible, parse-server is far from dead, getting daily improvements in performance, extensibility (Postgres, push notifications queues...) and ease of use.<p>Parse is dead, long live Parse.

I was never a huge fan of parse, having seen startups fail hard when using it, and I&#x27;ve been pretty vocal about that in the past [1]. It was a great idea in principal, but failed pretty hard when faced with the reality of non-toy development.<p>I generally hate to see projects fail, but in this case I&#x27;m not terribly upset. I think that people were getting sucked into the ease of getting apps up and running quickly, then spending 2-3x the effort getting past that initial stage versus doing it in a more traditional stack.<p>Perhaps the open-source server might give the community some opportunity to fix the many, many glaring bugs and problems, but I have felt like the specific design of Parse itself was just too flawed to succeed.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10056033" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10056033</a>

This makes me wonder. If my startup reaches a certain amount of success, heck if only 5 customers, and for some reason I need to shut it down, what&#x27;s a graceful way to deal with it.<p>I can give each customer all of their data back in a nicely formatted zip file etc. But is that enough? customers are more likely to want an equivalent service (remember the Google RSS reader fiasco?). Even if a customer finds an alternative service on their own, there <i>should</i> be a way to import the said zip file from their previous services. This brings in the idea of &quot;service interoperability&quot; (and related import&#x2F;export) among startups that have no relation to each other. Apparently, standardizations like JSON etc, should make it easier.<p>Looks like a huge blind spot that the startup industry doesn&#x27;t pay attention to. (Graceful shutdown and graceful import&#x2F;export built in as a rule rather than the exception).

The export data feature has been broken for months — it’s stuck in the “waiting to begin…” phase. Is there plans to allow people to export their data?<p>I’d like to get my data out, but both options for exporting data via the dashboard are broken. They also disabled the ability to contact them in regards to the export data functionality.

I would like to make an appeal. Let&#x27;s use this post as a great recognition for the Parse team hard work and share also our lessons learned using Parse&#x2F;Parse Server as a Backend. Thank you, Thank you guys. @csmajorfive, @gfosco, @laker, @HectorRamos,@jamesjyu, @flovilmart ... and everyone else

Ah yes, the day that so many unsupported apps stop working.

Quick... everyone run to www.graph.cool !! It&#x27;s parse but for GraphQL!

What are the founders next up to ? Interesting to hear about it.

Can someone clarify: does this mean all older versions of apps that were dependent on Parse are now orphaned?<p>That is, even if you&#x27;ve released a new version of your app that uses the open source Parse Server, any of your users that haven&#x27;t updated to the new version now essentially have a broken app?

Updated my Parse app several months ago away from Parse, but up to 600 DAU&#x27;s were still using the old versions - I&#x27;m not sure whether they&#x27;ll fail gracefully or not. You can&#x27;t convince some people to update their apps, they think it is a conspiracy!

I remember when Facebook announced the acquisition of Parse. I was talking to some devs who really like Parse. They were pretty down about the news. The comment that really struck me was, &quot;Now that Facebook bought them, I don&#x27;t trust Parse anymore.&quot; A lot of devs seemed to sour on Parse, but Facebook seemed to push back by seeming to say that Parse was going to be around for a long time. Well, that was interesting.

A key takeaway from this; and one of the main reasons parse failed-- don&#x27;t name a company or service after an extremely generic programming term.<p>Parse failed for a lot of reasons but I hated it because the documentation was terrible at the beginning and used to get me stuck in a forever loop of links. So I searched for additonal info:<p>&quot;Parse javascript&quot;<p>&quot;Parse website library&quot;<p>&quot;Parse programming&quot;<p>Admittedly contrived examples. But the point i am making is pretty clear.

I have been using Sashido for a while for two different apps.<p>I am surprised about their service. The migration was super easy and straightforward and it is as easy to use as Parse.<p>I would love to see them offering a cheaper option for very low traffic apps but 5 dollars for migrated apps is a fair rate that I can afford. Another option would be some discount if you already have apps hosted with them.

While I know there are people who say they loved their Parse experience, I suffered greatly. There are bugs, there are issues, there are simply things that either don&#x27;t work or are very hard to make work.<p>On top of it, architecture of the app I was trying to make work, was... challenging.<p>Anyhow, not a big fan, but it is open source and now you can fix those issues if you care about them.

It&#x27;s super sad. It was so great when it was hosted by them. I am bit worried about what is going to happen to the documentation.<p>I am currently using SashiDo which I quite like. Excellent support. Before that, I tried NodeChef, but I have found Sashido a little more intuitive. Your millage may vary.

At my last job one of my biggest projects was a migration off of parse to a postgres backend. Fun times.

I liked the graceful shutdown that Parse had. Always thought that FB would just unplug the wire

Hope facebook will opensource the original Parse platform. Less likely, but just hoping.

Does anyone know if the same admin UI (tables, settings) is available with Parse Server?

By looking at their websites i have no idea what their product is about.

This looks like it does similar things that Parse was doing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;exis.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;exis.io&#x2F;</a>

As a non-developer who found Parse extremely easy to use, is there a similar product in the market that I can switch my iPhone app over to?

So we know there is a Go version somewhere I wonder why they didn&#x27;t opensource this instead of rewriting everything to nodejs...

Thank you for your service Parse. I&#x27;ll me

can someone tldr us on what happened to parse?

Anyone want to explain to me like I am five, because I got no fricking idea what it does and why would I want it?

The open source Parse Server offers more benefits than hosted parse.com. Many of the benefits are outlined in this blog post: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.parse.com&#x2F;announcements&#x2F;what-is-parse-server&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.parse.com&#x2F;announcements&#x2F;what-is-parse-server&#x2F;</a> Whatever you are building with Parse Server, Nodechef can help you get there faster. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nodechef.com&#x2F;parse-server" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nodechef.com&#x2F;parse-server</a>

The Parse folks seem to have handled this reasonably well but this is the perfect illustration of why building your own application around a third party service like this is not a pure win. There is a tradeoff and it can in fact bite you.

Why do I feel like this post is getting brigaded by Sashido?

What an incredible journey!

I read this as &quot;Paris is shutting down today&quot;<p>I guess my parser is offline too...

Check out the Parse Migration Guide to migrate away without any downtime - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.parsemigrationguide.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.parsemigrationguide.com&#x2F;</a>