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Parse will Shut Down their Service

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Parse Co-founder Kevin Lacker announced that the Facebook-owned DBaaS platform will wind down its operation to be fully retired at the end of January 2017. This announcement gave rise to many complaints from developers, yet Facebook is trying to make the transition easy and several alternatives are available.

No official explanation has been provided for the decision of shutting down Parse, though Mike Isaac and Quentin Hardy suggested on the New York Times that it might come down to two factors. On the one hand, being Facebook’s business much more clearly defined today than it was at the time of Parse acquisition, in 2013, when Facebook was allegedly “eager to seek out other lines of business in hopes of future profits”; on the other, the difficulty of competing with cloud services offered by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, and the financial and engineering investment it would have required. Facebook spokesman Michael Kirkland partially confirmed this analysis by explaining that Facebook “want to dedicate more resources to high-impact products and services in areas like analytics, monetization, discovery, and authentication”.

Parse, a service that, according to Isaac and Hardy, still has about 15 million customers and powered many mobile apps, including successful ones such as Oculus’, Quip’s, and Orbitz’s, is providing a clear path forward for developers to move their data out and into a different service. As Lacker explained, this includes:

As mentioned, developers will have time until end of January 2017 to complete the migration. Still, Parse suggest to stick to a two-step schedule:

  • migrating the data to a self-hosted MongoDB server by April 28, 2016;
  • finish setting things up and release a new app using the newly hosted Parse Server by July 28, 2016.

Self-hosting MongoDB through Parse Server in undoubtedly the easiest migration path for small apps that do not need a large infrastructure and do not rely on push notifications and analytics, which are not covered by Parse migration plan. Alternatively, developers can modify their apps to use any of Parse competitors, such as apigee, Firebase, Orchestrate.io, Azure, AWS and many more.

You can get a peek into developers’ reactions to Parse announcement by visiting a number of discussions on Reddit and Hacker News. Also, Federico Viticci at Mac Stories compiled a list of some reactions that can be found on Twitter.

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Community comments

  • My migration recommendation

    by Alysson Melo,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    I'm a web and mobile developer. Parse it is a good solution for a quick app backend setup but I never realized build big things over there. To me the most important to me is no vendor lock-in I see as very important to have full control over what I'm developing. I started to use a great platform parse.back4app.com (parse.back4apps.com) and I'm happy with the results. I recommend it as a migration option. At any moment you can have your code totally portable. It is easy-to-use (MDD oriented) and they have a migration plan for parse.

  • Goodbye Parse, Hello moBack!

    by Sierra Burt,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    moBack is an upcoming mBaas platform which is quickly gaining traction. It has a cloud based service for developers just starting up and an enterprise grade one for more established applications. Since it has been built by a team of application developers with experience of building over 350 applications on mbaas solutions like Parse and private installations too. moBack overcomes the shortfalls of all these platforms.

    www.moback.com

  • Facing the same issue and Got the better Solution

    by Dipti Arora,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Hello,

    The official announcement of Parse Shut Down gave me a big shock.

    I was in the same situation as you are. And many from app industry are facing the same issue and finding alternative solution.

    I researched a lot and already talked with various app development platform providers and check their platforms. As per my analysis, I found Configure.IT as reliable and perfect solution who can handle this situation properly. Actually my 10 to 15 apps are on Parse. So I was bit worried about it.

    I also want to suggest this platform to everyone who are passing through the same situation . I have checked all the features and facilities provided by this platform and also talked with the authorized persons of this platform. Really a genuine one. Got info from here: www.configure.it/migrate-from-parse-cit-solutio...

    So finally I have given the project of my apps migration to Configure.IT and they are doing it very nicely. Thanks to whole team. Thanks a lot.

  • Easiest way to migrate from Parse

    by John Miller,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    I’ve migrated two apps using Back4app platform. They have a migration wizard and video which allow users to do so in less than 5 minutes.

    blog.back4app.com/2016/03/01/quick-wizard-migration/

    blog.back4app.com/2016/03/14/parse-com-to-back4...

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