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Show HN: CloudBoost – Open-Source Parse, Firebase and Algolia Combined into One

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Re: Show HN: CloudBoost – Open-Source Parse, Firebase and Algolia Combined into One

#31

Post by nawazdhandala »

sapeien wrote: post #18
cyberferret wrote: post #17

Not sure if it is the HN "hug of death", but I found the Cloudboost.io site quite slow to load up here. For a service touting scalability and fast performance, a slow marketing site doesn't lend to the credibility. Lets hope it is a temporary thing that will be resolved. I am excited by the project.

Actually the site loads about 4.3 MB of compressed data over the network, or 6.5 MB uncompressed. Edit: out of curiosity, I looked at the package.json of their open source project, there are 51 top-level dependencies. After installing, there's 140 MB of dependencies, or about 800k lines of JS. Quality is fractal.

Thank you for the feedback. We're working to optimize the site + dependencies. :)

Re: Show HN: CloudBoost – Open-Source Parse, Firebase and Algolia Combined into One

#32

Post by daddykotex »

nawazdhandala wrote: post #27
nodesocket wrote: post #10

CloudBoost looks amazing. I can tell they've put a ton of effort into the app, docs, and website. This brings me to their problem... Pricing! Their pricing ( https://www.cloudboost.io/pricing ) makes little to zero sense. First it is priced too low, a sign of future problems ahead. Second, I think they've got the entire model wrong. They should charge for bundles of API calls and GB of storage. Pay for what you use l…

I'm Nawaz from CloudBoost. 100% agree. The idea was when you reach a $99 plan, we install CloudBoost on your own Cloud. But a pay as you go service makes a lot more sense. If you want to install the service on your own machine, you can always check out our enterprise / open source options. Thank you for your feedback again. This helped a lot.

Good stuff out there. One suggestion I'd make is that you put a curl snippet where you show how to create apps. Something like:

``` SERVER=http://localhost APPID=test SECUREKEY=key curl "$SERVER/app/$APPID" \ -d "{ \"secureKey\": \"$SECUREKEY\" }" ```

Re: Show HN: CloudBoost – Open-Source Parse, Firebase and Algolia Combined into One

#33

Post by rawrmaan »

nawazdhandala wrote: post #28
sapeien wrote: post #25

I think the nuances of the offering are not entirely clear from the marketing website, so here's what I've interpreted. The product itself seems to be a Node.js framework that glues together various modules, including popular ones such as Express, Mongoose, & Socket.io. How they monetize it is via consulting and hosting, which they offer a fixed price for "unlimited" bandwidth and storage (very unclear how they may t…

Disclosure: I'm Nawaz from the CloudBoost team. - Yes, it does bundle frameworks but more importantly, it bundles databases like Mongo, Elastic, Redis etc. The idea is we completely abstract databases away from you and give you an API which does everything. We handle the rest like data sync between these databases, managing databases, scaling, etc. - We're on a "Pay as you go pricing". Let me know your thoughts on th…

On the last point--I think trying to do this is one of the big reasons Parse failed. Auto optimizing DBs is an incredibly complex and delicate task.

My Parse app's write performance suffered because my biggest table (27m rows, 10 small columns, 15GB) ended up with 17 auto-created indexes, taking up an additional 15GB of space.

Re: Show HN: CloudBoost – Open-Source Parse, Firebase and Algolia Combined into One

#35

Post by nawazdhandala »

mentos wrote: post #34

I used Parse and Firebase for a mobile app project a few years ago and I always felt the combination was necessary. Firebase is great for real time data like chat streams while Parse did all of the unexciting user account stuff.

I completely agree!

Re: Show HN: CloudBoost – Open-Source Parse, Firebase and Algolia Combined into One

#36

Post by skinp »

rawrmaan wrote: post #33
nawazdhandala wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I'm Nawaz from the CloudBoost team. - Yes, it does bundle frameworks but more importantly, it bundles databases like Mongo, Elastic, Redis etc. The idea is we completely abstract databases away from you and give you an API which does everything. We handle the rest like data sync between these databases, managing databases, scaling, etc. - We're on a "Pay as you go pricing". Let me know your thoughts on th…

On the last point--I think trying to do this is one of the big reasons Parse failed. Auto optimizing DBs is an incredibly complex and delicate task. My Parse app's write performance suffered because my biggest table (27m rows, 10 small columns, 15GB) ended up with 17 auto-created indexes, taking up an additional 15GB of space.

Disclosure: I worked on Parse.

I personally wouldn't call Parse a "failure" and without going into details, this has absolutely nothing to do with why Parse shutdown.

That said the real challenge, that other such platforms might not have, was handling all the very different DB workloads for all the apps we were hosting.

I worked on some of the pieces of that auto indexer. In most cases, this is a feature that was both necessary for us and extremely useful for our customers who didn't know how to manage their own DB. What was arguably missing was a way to expose the indexing operations to the developers, although this would have brought it's share of other challenges for obvious reasons.

If we created 17 indexes on the same collection (in some cases, it was way! more), that's because there were query families issued that needed those 17 indexes. I can't say this is your case, but in almost all instances I've seen, this was a result of poorly designed DB schemas and query patterns. Of course, for developers who know what they're doing, it's hard to design properly when you're dealing with a blackbox.

Yes, amplification and DB size are an issue when over indexing but our auto indexer was under constant tweaking and wasn't creating indexes "just because".

It remains a very hard problem...

Re: Show HN: CloudBoost – Open-Source Parse, Firebase and Algolia Combined into One

#37

Post by nawazdhandala »

daddykotex wrote: post #32
nawazdhandala wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Nawaz from CloudBoost. 100% agree. The idea was when you reach a $99 plan, we install CloudBoost on your own Cloud. But a pay as you go service makes a lot more sense. If you want to install the service on your own machine, you can always check out our enterprise / open source options. Thank you for your feedback again. This helped a lot.

Good stuff out there. One suggestion I'd make is that you put a curl snippet where you show how to create apps. Something like: ``` SERVER= http://localhost APPID=test SECUREKEY=key curl "$SERVER/app/$APPID" \ -d "{ \"secureKey\": \"$SECUREKEY\" }" ```

Great idea! :) We'll get the docs updated. :)

Re: Show HN: CloudBoost – Open-Source Parse, Firebase and Algolia Combined into One

#38

Post by whyileft »

nawazdhandala wrote: post #28
sapeien wrote: post #25

I think the nuances of the offering are not entirely clear from the marketing website, so here's what I've interpreted. The product itself seems to be a Node.js framework that glues together various modules, including popular ones such as Express, Mongoose, & Socket.io. How they monetize it is via consulting and hosting, which they offer a fixed price for "unlimited" bandwidth and storage (very unclear how they may t…

Disclosure: I'm Nawaz from the CloudBoost team. - Yes, it does bundle frameworks but more importantly, it bundles databases like Mongo, Elastic, Redis etc. The idea is we completely abstract databases away from you and give you an API which does everything. We handle the rest like data sync between these databases, managing databases, scaling, etc. - We're on a "Pay as you go pricing". Let me know your thoughts on th…

> There are also absolutely no tests

Could you address this? I rarely trust anything in active development without any test coverage. So maybe I'm missing it somewhere?

Re: Show HN: CloudBoost – Open-Source Parse, Firebase and Algolia Combined into One

#39

Post by nawazdhandala »

whyileft wrote: post #38
nawazdhandala wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I'm Nawaz from the CloudBoost team. - Yes, it does bundle frameworks but more importantly, it bundles databases like Mongo, Elastic, Redis etc. The idea is we completely abstract databases away from you and give you an API which does everything. We handle the rest like data sync between these databases, managing databases, scaling, etc. - We're on a "Pay as you go pricing". Let me know your thoughts on th…

> There are also absolutely no tests Could you address this? I rarely trust anything in active development without any test coverage. So maybe I'm missing it somewhere?

I'm sorry, I forgot to address that. Yes, tests are actually here : https://github.com/cloudboost/javascriptsdk

I know that's stupid. We'll move it to the parent repo.

Let me know if this helps.

Re: Show HN: CloudBoost – Open-Source Parse, Firebase and Algolia Combined into One

#40

Post by nawazdhandala »

skinp wrote: post #36
rawrmaan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the last point--I think trying to do this is one of the big reasons Parse failed. Auto optimizing DBs is an incredibly complex and delicate task. My Parse app's write performance suffered because my biggest table (27m rows, 10 small columns, 15GB) ended up with 17 auto-created indexes, taking up an additional 15GB of space.

Disclosure: I worked on Parse. I personally wouldn't call Parse a "failure" and without going into details, this has absolutely nothing to do with why Parse shutdown. That said the real challenge, that other such platforms might not have, was handling all the very different DB workloads for all the apps we were hosting. I worked on some of the pieces of that auto indexer. In most cases, this is a feature that was bot…

I completely agree. :)
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