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Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

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Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#11

Post by x0x0 »

exelius wrote: post #2

Parse never made sense to me. 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 compa…

Parse made a lot of sense to me. Building a simple backend isn't much work, but operating it sucks. You get to deal with script kiddies, hackers, hard drives dying, services crapping themselves at inconvenient times of day, backups, testing backups, security updates (and what is probably more work, monitoring security updates) for the OS and web server and proxy and db and on and on. Maybe there isn't a pricing model that makes this work, but I think there's a real desire.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#13

Post by petercooper »

exelius wrote: post #2

Parse never made sense to me. 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 compa…

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.

Heroku? Salesforce bought them, still going, still very heavily used.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#15

Post by anthonybsd »

th0ma5 wrote: post #12

How is Slack not also a house of cards like Parse?

Slack is gaining a lot of momentum in the enterprise space as a collaboration platform. Considering that they are basically a supercharged IRC, I'd say that's pretty nifty. I don't see them shutting down any time soon.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#16

Post by arihant »

Jare wrote: post #10
gkoberger wrote: post #3

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. Like I said, it sucks Parse is shutting down. But in ~2 hours, you can get the open so…

> in ~2 hours, you can get the open source Parse clone they released going and be back to new I keep hearing this, and I have a hard time believing it. Are there any examples of a significant app/developer doing this? Sure a working Parse Server is easy to get up and running, but the reason someone wouold choose Parse was to avoid operations, and that's not a service you build in your company in 2 hrs. (as an aside,…

Parse Server uses Mongo, there are plenty of operations-free Mongo hosting options, like Compose. Also, Parse server code itself could be given to company such as Heroku or AWS beanstalk to host it for you.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#17

Post by jonknee »

exelius wrote: post #2

Parse never made sense to me. 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 compa…

Parse made no sense as part of Facebook, but would have made sense if part of AWS or even Microsoft.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#18

Post by tomatohs »

th0ma5 wrote: post #12

How is Slack not also a house of cards like Parse?

Slack is (or should not be) mission critical. If Slack shuts down, you can still communicate with your team through email, SMS, or any other alternative. Your product will remain in operation even if Slack dies.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#19

Post by jonknee »

x0x0 wrote: post #11
exelius wrote: post #2

Parse never made sense to me. 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 compa…

Parse made a lot of sense to me. Building a simple backend isn't much work, but operating it sucks. You get to deal with script kiddies, hackers, hard drives dying, services crapping themselves at inconvenient times of day, backups, testing backups, security updates (and what is probably more work, monitoring security updates) for the OS and web server and proxy and db and on and on. Maybe there isn't a pricing model…

Parse makes sense in general, but not for Facebook. Facebook is a walled garden that makes its money selling advertising. They don't offer any other developer oriented offerings and don't seem inclined to opening their data centers up for a public cloud.
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