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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?

#51

Post by semerda »

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,…

If someone wrapped it as a microservice with containers and a deployment script for AWS then yes. Otherwise the configuration alone would take few hours. This then begs the question; was/is AWS or Google a better backend to rely on long term.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#52

Post by dev360 »

jonknee wrote: post #17
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.

Wonder if founders knew this but were just happy to get acquired. Can't say I would blame them.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#53

Post by dev360 »

yelnatz wrote: post #23
tomatohs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Slack is not mission critical, you mean.

Oh noes, slack is down we can't deploy :(

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#55

Post by braythwayt »

dev360 wrote: post #50
braythwayt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I nodded so vigorously that I need a chiropractor. This perfectly describes my experience in the web industry and the client-server industry before that. Only the particular languages and frameworks change, but the patterns remain the same.

By patterns you mean GoF??!

There are management and architecture patterns as well as design patterns.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#56

Post by docCaliban »

jt2190 wrote: post #42
nostrademons wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't make sense to me until I had a.) started a company and b.) saw the historical tech stacks of a number of companies (eg. Google, Facebook, EBay) that had hit it big. I started my career with the belief that your company has one tech stack, the chief architect chooses it when the company is founded, and that you never ever rewrite it because you're in for a world of pain if you do. I learned that basically no…

While I agree completely with your comment, I wished you'd written "made architectural choices based on facts that are no longer true" instead of "is an idiot." Nobody sets out to make bad choices on purpose, and only the extremely lucky make architectural choices that survive massive growth. (I believe Etsy had a policy of rewrites needing to support current needs multiplied by five. This acknowledges that there's a…

Wrong: "made architectural choices based on facts that are no longer true"

Less wrong: "made architectural choices based on personal preferance"

Don't be such a politically correct idiot!

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#57

Post by bdcravens »

petercooper wrote: post #13
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.

For most applications, you're just hosting on Heroku. You can move your application. That's not really a dependency, unlike Parse, where their SDK is deep in your application code. (Oversimplifying what you'd need to do to move, though you can keep the simple deployment story with something like Ckoud 66) It's not a perfect analogy, but Heroku is like AWS EC2, whereas Parse is like AWS Lambda.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#58

Post by jakejake »

Sometimes I really feel like I'm falling behind the times because I don't use a lot of third party services or platforms for my company's apps. I feel like I stick with simple tools at the expense of not getting any "good stuff" for free.

When something like this shutdown occurs though it makes me glad that I can just spin up a plain old server or two and put together whatever services that I need. I can't tell if I'm a dinosaur or a maverick!

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#60

Post by golergka »

nostrademons wrote: post #29
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…

It didn't make sense to me until I had a.) started a company and b.) saw the historical tech stacks of a number of companies (eg. Google, Facebook, EBay) that had hit it big. I started my career with the belief that your company has one tech stack, the chief architect chooses it when the company is founded, and that you never ever rewrite it because you're in for a world of pain if you do. I learned that basically no…

And, personally, I think that this stack rewrite path makes a _lot_ of sense and probably should be planned from the beginning.

The business requirements to the architecture — not functionality! — change over time. At first, you have to be lean as hell and try a lot of different stuff. Then, you need to scale, and performance becomes an issue. Some time afterwards, you want to add more features to increase monetization and retention, and here you start needing good, abstracted out architecture for all this stuff not to interfere with each other. And finally, you find the sweet spot, and start to really care about bug-free experience, maintainability and reliability.

And all these different business priorities are best suited by different languages, different design approaches, different architectures and people with different personality traits.

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