So the death bell has finally been
sounded. The most sought after Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) provider is
now slowly receding into history. Facebook, which acquired Parse in 2013 has
finally decided to shut it down on January 28th, 2016. This might seem a bad news for developers at
first, but there are a number of positive things associated with this decision.
Parse will completely shut down on
January 27th, 2017 and though it did come as a rude shock to its many users,
shutting down of Parse is not necessarily the worst thing that has happened. In
fact, if a detailed view is taken, this might turn out to be good news too.
The history
It was one of the
best programming languages to come into the scene.
When it did appear on the scene, amidst
competition from Microsoft (Azure) and Amazon(AWS), Parse was seen as just
another kid off the block. But its appeal lied in its simplicity and they
scaled it up pretty quickly. The main reason for its popularity was its total
management principle.
It’s easy to use and well documented
SDKs, extremely attractive pricing, smart backend portal and its ability to
handle everything, right from cloud computing to user authentication, made it
very popular amongst developers.
It became the first choice for most
organisations, involved in the development of back end apps and services.
How Did it
Happen?
Then the rude shock. Not many were happy
with announcement Facebook made on the 28th of January. The idea of
acquiring Parse was borne out of the fact that the SaaS provider was an ideal platform
for developers to create apps which could directly be in competition with
Facebook. So closing it down made a good business sense. But even though it
does impact the individual developer, Facebook has provided means for everyone
to have their data transferred to another SaaS server.
So why is it good
news?
Parse, by providing the entire backend
life cycle support, would keep the user experience database with itself. With
it gone and the entire control now in the developer’s hand, it does make sense
that the creator keeps his own user base.
Developers now have a free hand in owning
the stack and creating their own work flows. There will be initial expenses,
but if one is thinking of scaling things up then it probably is going to be
much cheaper.
Moreover, you are out of Facebook’s
volatile strategic decision making. Nothing more can be more useful than this.Of course, no one is expecting things
will start falling into place right away. Parse has issued an excellent
migration guidebook for users to migrate their data to other SaaS.
To fully overcome this sudden change,
users might just have to ramp up operations. Maybe, hire new talent and create
back end infrastructure, but the developers community is already up to task and
several new alternatives have propped up
lately.
The
biggest gift
Developers will love the
development for a number of reasons. The biggest take away from this is
independence. No matter how brilliantly Parse would serve its users, its
closing down has given everyone the opportunity to be independent. This will
surely create a new wave of ecosystems for technology to grow further.
