
Parse is shutting down today - jpdlla
https://status.parse.com/incidents/6mpkbscqw6p9
======
gfosco
During this year-long shutdown/migration process, the open-source and
community maintained Parse Server is what most people switched to. Parse is
yours now. [https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-
server](https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server)

~~~
eriknstr
Something I've been wondering is would you recommend using the open source
Parse server for new code or is it more targeted towards projects that were
already using the Parse API?

~~~
BinaryIdiot
It's geared towards legacy. I have used parse in 3 different projects (none of
that was my choice, these were existing projects I had to take over) and I
would NEVER recommend it for new projects.

The way everyone seems to use it, in my experience, is giving the _client_
credentials to manipulate the _full database_ which is absolutely insane.
Obviously this is not good practice but every single parse project I've gotten
thrown into _already did this_ and it was a significant amount of work to move
it to be more secure and NOT do that. I think the way it's created makes it
very, very easy to make bad security choices.

It's also basically a RESTful CRUD. That's mostly it minus some, mostly minor,
bells and whistles. You can already do this with about 20 different open
source stacks very easily and you're not stuck using this parse technology.

I can't articulate just how much trouble parse has given me. I even took an
app and re-wrote its entire backend away from parse significantly faster than
doing a handful of updates.

~~~
jkestner
Later versions don't let you easily give the client full access. You instead
have to do it through Cloud Code (another facet of Parse), so the key never
leaves the server.

Not to disagree with your overall assessment. I'm generally wary of these
swiss-knife frameworks - they're written for a particular use case in mind,
and if your project doesn't fit that, you may go through contortions to get
things working smoothly.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> Later versions don't let you easily give the client full access. You instead
> have to do it through Cloud Code (another facet of Parse), so the key never
> leaves the server.

That's fantastic! I never kept track of which version(s) I worked on but I had
transitioned one project from Parse to Parse Server and it was still able to
work this way but I'm glad they made progress to try and force better
security.

------
mcescalante
I have seen a fair number of "abrupt" and poorly executed shutdowns on HN over
the last few years, and although I don't use Parse, I feel as though the team
did a good job sunsetting this over the last year. Thank you for the product,
the open sourced version, and for not ditching your community! Best of luck to
everyone who worked on the team

~~~
nickpsecurity
Yeah, that's pretty impressive. YC should consider making it a requirement of
funding that the components go open-source if they shutdown without
acquisition, etc. Aside from collective benefit, a future, YC startup might
get a head start from their docs or components. They seem to fund multiple
startups in the same market segments at times.

~~~
TylerE
That would likely be overly onerous...what if they use licensed 3rd party
components?

~~~
hkmurakami
And in such a case, an Open Source mandate would directly conflict with the
financial interests of the investors (the time required for the effort takes
away from the liquidation amount of the remaining assets.

~~~
nickpsecurity
It would only if the software source or patents compromised the value they
gained from the business. This would be the case for some startups. It
wouldn't be for others where brand, talent, & existing users were what they
were after.

It also wouldn't take any significant time given developers could just push
the final source and docs into a Github repo with a license. Or just dump it
as a zip on the web. That's nothing. Also a good chance that at least one ex-
developer would like to do it just so their work wasn't totally wasted.

~~~
jsmeaton
How many production systems have you come across that could be dumped onto the
public without any cleaning? Credentials, build systems, personal information,
patent use, are a couple of examples that I've seen in prod code that couldn't
or shouldn't be included.

Assuming the cost of open sourcing something is zero, even if it's just a zip
dump, is usually not correct.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Fair enough. I forgot about the malpractice of putting credentials and
personal information in the code itself. Companies doing that would have a
hard time open sourcing the code. Others whose build system doesnt cleanly
separate 3rd party or internal stuff might also have trouble. Patents I
already handled by saying they simply don't release third party stuff that's
proprietary. Patent-encumbered code or tech is one such thing.

So, yeah, I'll take those corrections.

------
DivineTraube
A little Parse trivia a gathered from talking to (very capable) Parse
engineers that now work at FB:

\- Still the world's largest MongoDB user

\- Had 1M apps, largest one with 40M users

\- Server was Rails at first (24 threads max. concurrency), later rewritten in
Go

\- >40 MongoDB Replica Sets with 3 nodes each. Storage Engine: RockDB
(MongoRocks). No sharding (DB-to-replica-set-mapping). Only instance storage
SSDs, no EBS.

\- Write Concern 1 (!) - some people complained about lost data and stale
reads (slave reads were allowed for performance reasons)

\- Partial updates were problematic as small updates to large docs get "write
amplification" when being written to oplog

\- Experienced frequent (daily) master reelections on AWS EC2. Rollback files
were discarded -> data loss

\- Special flashback tool that recorded workloads that could be rerun for load
and functional testing

\- JS ran in forked V8 engine to enforce 15s execution limit

\- No sharding automation: manual, error-prone process for largest customers

\- Indexing not exposed: automatic rule-based generation from slow query logs.
Did not work well for larger apps.

\- Slow queries killed by cron job that polled Mongos currentOp and maintained
a limit per API-key + query combination

\- It was planned to migrate Parse to FB's infrastructure but the project was
abandoned

\- Clash of clans used Parse for push notifications and made up roughly half
of all pushes

I find this extremely interesting, as we are building a BaaS, too, but have a
very different approach (Baqend). Coming from a database background, our idea
is that developers should know about details such as schemas and indexes (the
Parse engineers strongly agreed in hindsight). Also we think that BaaS is not
limited to mobile but very useful for the web.

Also I think that providers should be open about their infrastructure and
trade-offs, which Parse only was after it had already failed.

~~~
hota_mazi
> which Parse only was after it had already failed

You just listed some pretty impressive metrics, Parse was acquired for $85M
and yet, you still think that Parse failed?

I'm curious what you would call a success.

~~~
nodamage
A product that is acquired and subsequently shut down because the acquirer has
no interest in it is indeed a _failed product_ as far as I'm concerned, even
if said acquisition was a financial success for the investors and employees.

~~~
hota_mazi
It was acquired because it was successful.

The failure is 100% on Facebook's side. They could have decided to keep the
business up, they decided no to.

Thankfully, Google is doubling down on a similar business, so we have
alternatives.

------
telecuda
While the Parse team did an excellent job open-sourcing the platform and
providing ample notice, it was still a costly learning experience.

Seamlessly transitioning a large user base on iPhone and Android to our self-
hosted Parse with minimal service interruption or missed push notifications
required significant engineering and coordination. The transition involved
more hours than the initial build.

While we did our best (email campaigns, push notifications, etc.) we still
have a sizable number of users who use the app daily, yet haven't updated it
and are still pointing to (the old) Parse. We didn't plan on Parse going away
back then, so those are not graceful failures.

Users who did update the app were signed out (couldn't maintain the session in
the switch), resulting in a lot of "I didn't get my forgot password email"
questions to support and an unknown number who won't bother troubleshooting
it.

With the information at hand over a year ago, I still would have went with
Parse. It really did help us get off the ground quickly. Maybe we would have
missed our window of opportunity without it.

------
vning93
I loved Parse from the time I first started using it in college. It started
out as a really handy way to spin up small apps quickly so I could start beta
testing my app quickly with real users.

One of the main problems though was that it really felt like just a
prototyping tool to me, and I never really used it for real apps in
production.

Thus, for my latest project that I've been working on for several months now,
I've decided to try in every way to address that problem. I started a company
called Scaphold.io ([https://scaphold.io](https://scaphold.io)) and it's a
GraphQL backend as a service platform. It serves to address many of the same
needs of Parse and more. It combines all the best data modeling tools from
Parse and real-time capabilities from Firebase to provide a high-fidelity app
development experience that you can actually build real production apps on,
with as much transparency to your data as possible. That's the mission that we
have at Scaphold, and I'm excited to be helping all the stranded app
developers out there that were burned by Parse shutting down.

Excited to see what comes next for the app development world!

~~~
djm_
I was wondering if you have a public policy in place which outlines what would
happen in the event of a Parse-like shutdown or other end-of-company-life
event occurring?

I ask in the hopes that it won't be taken as too negative a question but your
company is VC-backed in the database space and we've lost a few too many of
those this last year.

~~~
beachstartup
if you run a company or product, it's on you to make sure your data is
recoverable and your product is fixable in the event of an outage.

expecting a vendor to tell you exactly how they're going to fold is something
they can surely dream up and send to you so you feel better about the nature
of the universe, but something you shouldn't really rely on.

in other words, assume the worst will happen, despite assurances of the
contrary.

~~~
djm_
Fully agreed, I still find it helpful to judge the response and general
attitude of the company in question though.

In this instance, it was exactly what I was hoping for.

~~~
beachstartup
the problem is in many circumstances the entire management or operations teams
can be forcibly removed by investors etc. many of these companies are all
volatile, high growth venture-backed companies with financial and corporate
shenanigans being pulled left and right.

i wouldn't say the risk is attitude, or intentions. you know what they say
about good intentions...

------
rawrmaan
Parse was an amazing discovery when I was just starting out my dev career and
I've used it in all of my major projects, but it had some serious
shortcomings. I wrote about why I think Parse failed from a developer's
perspective.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522602)

~~~
mofirouz
Why do you think Parse was a failure in the first place? Surely, Parse
founders got a nice little cash out of the acquisition and Facebook got
developers onboard and Facebook Login integrated onto many apps.

~~~
jonathankoren
Depends. I don't know what the acquisition price was but given that they're
shutting it down, I'm thinking it was in tens of millions range, which makes
it an aquihire. Assuming they raised low to mid tens of funding, The investors
probably have a 1x or more a preference on the sale. This means the leftover
value is in the low to mid ones of millions. I love that you're getting 0.1%
So we're talking like ones of thousands of dollars for an engineer after two
years of work at probably less than market rate salary.

Given that your equity package at a large company would be is late and 50
times that per year yeah the engineers didn't come out ahead so it's a fail.

~~~
csmajorfive
This is wildly wrong.

~~~
itsweller
Baseless conjecture shot down immediately by someone intimately involved with
the project is truly something beautiful to behold.

Are you at liberty to discuss the actual reasons and shed a bit more light on
why things went down the way they did?

Side note, your product was unbelievably popular at my university. Parse made
getting a functional DB up and running for courses and side projects
completely painless and a no-brainer for tight deadlines and PoCs.

------
deanclatworthy
I've spent the last 15 minutes on parse.com, github.com trying to find out
what the parse backend actually is. Can someone explain?

~~~
reilly3000
Parse was a backend as a service that allowed for a cloud hosted database to
be connected with web and mobile apps with simple JavaScript. It was a lovely
tool for hackathons. They could also run arbitrary JS in response to events at
scale. It competed with Firebase until they were acquired by Facebook.

~~~
mtve
It all makes me feel very stupid. I did programming since childhood and web
since the beginning, I was clouds (virtualization) user even before
millennium, I do backends for a living, saw a lot of JS code, know something
about mobile apps, but I must join this thread.

"Parse Server is an open source version of the Parse backend that can be
deployed to any infrastructure that can run Node.js" \- each of these words
one-by-one do have some meanings, but altogether they have none, neither your
explanation for me. I fully believe it's totally my fault and it's hopeless,
so please no reply.

~~~
Groxx
"a cloud hosted database" \+ "run arbitrary JS in response to events at scale"
covers most of it. It's a hosted database and server.

~~~
ProblemFactory
A cloud hosted database is accurate, but doesn't really describe it well.
Amazon, Heroku and others also provide cloud hosted PostgreSQL, which is a
very different use case.

Parse was a:

* cloud hosted nosql database,

* with client libraries for mobile platforms,

* _direct write access_ from mobile apps, without hosting your own API backend in the middle, and

* some methods of securing this direct write access from untrusted clients.

~~~
Groxx
Yes, but covering all the important parts exceeds the "couple sentences / one
short paragraph" goal. First and foremost it's a DB + server + client libs (I
entirely agree on that one, it's a major value-prop). Details beyond that are
many.

Other important parts may include "runs on node.js", "server code in JS",
"client + server define ACL per row", "push notifications", "amazingly,
supports windows mobile", etc, depending on the viewer. That's what the rest
of the documentation is for, e.g. in a features list.

------
dmode
This is a real bummer. I am not a programmer by profession (I am a PM), but I
took time to learn Parse from scratch to quickly write my own app. I managed
to launch my app on App store and everything was well till Parse announced
their shutdown. Unfortunately, with a 1 yr old at home and a demanding work /
commute, I didn't really have the time to learn about their migration guidance
or educate myself on a new platform. So my App will stop working from today,
which is a bummer.

For people who are more knowledgeable than me, I was really using Parse as a
data store and using their APIs to store and retrieve data. I really liked
their visual tools where I can create tables (classes) almost like in an excel
document. This meant that I didn't have to learn a DB language. Is there a
comparable tool that has similar features ? I have looked at Mongolab and
Firebase and both seemed a lot more complicated than Parse. Or do I need to
learn MongoDb now ?

~~~
jamroom
If you have some time and are looking for something easy check out Proxima:

[https://www.jamroom.net/proxima](https://www.jamroom.net/proxima)

It's really designed for someone that is not a developer first. I built a
MBaaS quite a few years ago, and Proxima was something I built on the side
since I wanted an easy backend to power my own app. I also wanted someplace to
do documentation, support, newsletters, etc. - so the idea with Proxima is
that you can focus 100% on JUST your app and Proxima will handle your
backend/website, etc.

Note too that it's not a SaaS - you would download and install it on your own
server (although we do offer the hosting as well if interested). It's open
source and free, so check it out if you're looking for something easy. Feel
free to contact me as well if you have any questions.

Hope this helps!

------
pixelmonkey
Found this on the Parse CEO's LinkedIn profile[1]:

"Facebook acquired the company for ~$100m in April 2013, intending to build a
business akin to Amazon Web Services, and we operated for two years as a semi-
independent subsidiary.

Facebook ultimately chose to exit the hosting business but Parse continues to
thrive as an open source project with official support at Amazon Web Services,
Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, etc."

Was this widely reported? I never knew that the internal plan with FB's Parse
acquisition was to build an AWS competitor. Kind of interesting!

I guess it was viewed as a hedge in case the FB on-platform advertising
revenue didn't grow as fast as they were predicting.

[1]:
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilyasukhar](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilyasukhar)

------
rogerthis
A few points on our parse.com and migration to parse-server experience:

\- I didn't like it initially. Not only the name (parse what?) but also
because people started using it as a relational storage, which it clearly were
not. Later, I became one of them (got convinced by colleagues).

\- We recommended parse.com to a few clients, and they really enjoyed it.

\- Had some issues with SDKs but we've been able to workaround them with the
help of parse's team (pre and post FB acquisition).

\- When the shutdown news came, that was a crossroad. Open source parse-server
had got too many issues and we decided to postpone and not follow the
recommended timeline. By august, we decided to stick to the open source
version, but still no decision on using a third-party provider for the parse-
server, mongodb, both, etc, etc. Also, the providers we had seen then turned
the yellow light on due to the shutdown experience. By october, it was decided
to follow the dark path of going on our own. For clients, we helped them on
specific needs.

\- The migration consisted of very minor changes in the "cloud code" part, and
almost no changes at all to client apps. Difficult part will be to scale our
infrastructure when needed.

BTW, we finalized the migration of our own app on saturday.

~~~
rabbie
I know sales pitches are frowned on here but in the interest of helping out
(with probably no return based on most users' Parse instance sizes), I have to
share this. We were in the same boat when Parse shut down so here's just
another option for anyone looking to migrate their app away still.

We took the parse server and built a hugely scalable platform on AWS and made
it free to signup. We're still adding features but if anyone wants to start
using it, it's in Production and available via
[http://octobas.com](http://octobas.com)

You can also migrate your app to any externally hosted MongoDB service (like
mlab.com) and simply connect your MongoDB instance to an Octobas.com Parse
Application. (still for free under the base plan.. this method actually works
out even cheaper when you scale up).

------
csmajorfive
I just want to say thank you to the HN community. We learned a lot in engaging
with folks here over the years.

~~~
ruslan_talpa
Hi Ilya, You've really done a nice job with this transition, so rare to see
people caring for their users until the end and keeping their word.

I am curious if you've ever looked at PostgREST, i think i've seen Tikhon
among ppl who starred it on github. Any comment on it? Thanks

------
realPubkey
So the alternative options are:

\- pouchDB -
[https://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb](https://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb)

\- RxDB - [https://github.com/pubkey/rxdb](https://github.com/pubkey/rxdb)

\- gunDB - [https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun)

\- horzion -
[https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon](https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon)

\- firebase - [https://firebase.google.com/](https://firebase.google.com/)

~~~
ahelwer
Kind of strange that you just threw in RxDB (your own creation?) and GunDB
(which is easily torn apart as snakeoil whenever it appears on HN) along with
the rest of them.

~~~
realPubkey
Yes RxDB is my creation. Didnt know that GunDB is not liked here, do you have
a link for me?

I just wanted to have a next-to-complete list.

------
flovilmart
Thanks to all contributors that made the transition to open-source possible,
parse-server is far from dead, getting daily improvements in performance,
extensibility (Postgres, push notifications queues...) and ease of use.

Parse is dead, long live Parse.

------
mmastrac
I was never a huge fan of parse, having seen startups fail hard when using it,
and I've been pretty vocal about that in the past [1]. It was a great idea in
principal, but failed pretty hard when faced with the reality of non-toy
development.

I generally hate to see projects fail, but in this case I'm not terribly
upset. I think that people were getting sucked into the ease of getting apps
up and running quickly, then spending 2-3x the effort getting past that
initial stage versus doing it in a more traditional stack.

Perhaps the open-source server might give the community some opportunity to
fix the many, many glaring bugs and problems, but I have felt like the
specific design of Parse itself was just too flawed to succeed.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10056033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10056033)

~~~
j_s
_I generally hate to see projects fail_

Many would be happy to fail like this!

 _Facebook acquires Parse, an app-support company, for $85 million_

[http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/26/business/la-fi-tn-
fa...](http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/26/business/la-fi-tn-facebook-
parse-85-million-20130425)

------
fizixer
This makes me wonder. If my startup reaches a certain amount of success, heck
if only 5 customers, and for some reason I need to shut it down, what's a
graceful way to deal with it.

I can give each customer all of their data back in a nicely formatted zip file
etc. But is that enough? customers are more likely to want an equivalent
service (remember the Google RSS reader fiasco?). Even if a customer finds an
alternative service on their own, there _should_ be a way to import the said
zip file from their previous services. This brings in the idea of "service
interoperability" (and related import/export) among startups that have no
relation to each other. Apparently, standardizations like JSON etc, should
make it easier.

Looks like a huge blind spot that the startup industry doesn't pay attention
to. (Graceful shutdown and graceful import/export built in as a rule rather
than the exception).

------
parseuser
The export data feature has been broken for months — it’s stuck in the
“waiting to begin…” phase. Is there plans to allow people to export their
data?

I’d like to get my data out, but both options for exporting data via the
dashboard are broken. They also disabled the ability to contact them in
regards to the export data functionality.

~~~
lacker
Email migration@parse.com for generic last-moment migration assistance.

~~~
parseuser
Thanks, but unfortunately they just replied with a canned email about their
migration guide.

There doesn't appear be any way to simply export data anymore.

------
alysson_b4a
I would like to make an appeal. Let's use this post as a great recognition for
the Parse team hard work and share also our lessons learned using Parse/Parse
Server as a Backend. Thank you, Thank you guys. @csmajorfive, @gfosco, @laker,
@HectorRamos,@jamesjyu, @flovilmart ... and everyone else

~~~
flovilmart
Thanks for the shoutout, but I'm not part of the parse team :)

~~~
alysson_b4a
Yes, you are! Parse Server Team :)

------
imns
Ah yes, the day that so many unsupported apps stop working.

~~~
giarc
As for iOS apps, I imagine Apple's new attempt to remove unsupported apps from
the app store will result in many of these apps getting the boot soon.

I've already seen the notification when opening an app that it might perform
slowly since it is not supported (or something along those lines).

~~~
DigitalJack
I've seen a notification like that, but it had to do with an App not being
compiled for 64 bit architecture.

------
bh13731
Quick... everyone run to www.graph.cool !! It's parse but for GraphQL!

~~~
ruslan_talpa
The way you phrased it almost seem sarcastic in the context of this thread,
although i think you are actually recommending them :)

They offer a interesting product but i think at this moment it has the exact
same problem that Parse had (my other comment in this thread), you don't have
access to the raw data, hope they will do that in the future (provide direct
access to the source database), it will certainly be a more
interesting/flexible service

~~~
schickling
Hi ruslan_talpa, I'm one of the founders of Graphcool. Thanks a lot for your
feedback. You're totally right: Not having direct access to YOUR data is one
of the main concerns about BaaS which we'll address at its core over the
coming months.

I'd be very keen on hearing your experience getting started building something
on Graphcool!

------
samblr
What are the founders next up to ? Interesting to hear about it.

~~~
lacker
Ilya's a VC now. [http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/09/parse-cofounder-and-y-
comb...](http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/09/parse-cofounder-and-y-combinator-
partner-ilya-sukhar-joins-matrix-partners/) James and I are still working at
Facebook, on other projects.

~~~
samblr
Cool. How big was team when parse was bought by Facebook ?

~~~
lacker
24 people

------
nodamage
Can someone clarify: does this mean all older versions of apps that were
dependent on Parse are now orphaned?

That is, even if you've released a new version of your app that uses the open
source Parse Server, any of your users that haven't updated to the new version
now essentially have a broken app?

~~~
bdcravens
Yes

~~~
nodamage
Well, that's quite unfortunate for the millions(?) of users whose apps will
break today for reasons they won't understand.

------
altitudinous
Updated my Parse app several months ago away from Parse, but up to 600 DAU's
were still using the old versions - I'm not sure whether they'll fail
gracefully or not. You can't convince some people to update their apps, they
think it is a conspiracy!

------
aceperry
I remember when Facebook announced the acquisition of Parse. I was talking to
some devs who really like Parse. They were pretty down about the news. The
comment that really struck me was, "Now that Facebook bought them, I don't
trust Parse anymore." A lot of devs seemed to sour on Parse, but Facebook
seemed to push back by seeming to say that Parse was going to be around for a
long time. Well, that was interesting.

------
vonklaus
A key takeaway from this; and one of the main reasons parse failed-- don't
name a company or service after an extremely generic programming term.

Parse failed for a lot of reasons but I hated it because the documentation was
terrible at the beginning and used to get me stuck in a forever loop of links.
So I searched for additonal info:

"Parse javascript"

"Parse website library"

"Parse programming"

Admittedly contrived examples. But the point i am making is pretty clear.

~~~
lacker
That sure wasn't one of the main reasons Parse failed! It is annoying though.
Perhaps we should have taken over some similar term, like "golang".

------
shollmann
I have been using Sashido for a while for two different apps.

I am surprised about their service. The migration was super easy and
straightforward and it is as easy to use as Parse.

I would love to see them offering a cheaper option for very low traffic apps
but 5 dollars for migrated apps is a fair rate that I can afford. Another
option would be some discount if you already have apps hosted with them.

------
desireco42
While I know there are people who say they loved their Parse experience, I
suffered greatly. There are bugs, there are issues, there are simply things
that either don't work or are very hard to make work.

On top of it, architecture of the app I was trying to make work, was...
challenging.

Anyhow, not a big fan, but it is open source and now you can fix those issues
if you care about them.

------
shadesofmike
It's super sad. It was so great when it was hosted by them. I am bit worried
about what is going to happen to the documentation.

I am currently using SashiDo which I quite like. Excellent support. Before
that, I tried NodeChef, but I have found Sashido a little more intuitive. Your
millage may vary.

------
LordHumungous
At my last job one of my biggest projects was a migration off of parse to a
postgres backend. Fun times.

------
rvitorper
I liked the graceful shutdown that Parse had. Always thought that FB would
just unplug the wire

------
r0y3
Hope facebook will opensource the original Parse platform. Less likely, but
just hoping.

------
martco
Does anyone know if the same admin UI (tables, settings) is available with
Parse Server?

~~~
tbrock
It is, it's called parse-dashboard and it's open source as well.

------
Asmod4n
By looking at their websites i have no idea what their product is about.

------
f50
This looks like it does similar things that Parse was doing:
[https://exis.io/](https://exis.io/)

------
Mankhool
As a non-developer who found Parse extremely easy to use, is there a similar
product in the market that I can switch my iPhone app over to?

------
throwaw181ay
So we know there is a Go version somewhere I wonder why they didn't opensource
this instead of rewriting everything to nodejs...

~~~
gfosco
The backend for running half a million apps doesn't look anything like the
backend for running a single app. Open-sourcing the actual Parse stack was not
an option, and no one would've put in the effort to actually run the _dozens_
of components involved. I started from scratch because that was the only way.

------
Michie
Thank you for your service Parse. I'll me

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dbancajas
can someone tldr us on what happened to parse?

~~~
st3v3r
Facebook bought it. Parse was highly coupled to AWS at the time. They spent
some 3 years trying to get it to run on Facebook's cloud, and apparently
failed to do so. Facebook decided to cut their losses, and shut it down.

~~~
csmajorfive
We did have many technical challenges (as would be expected, really) but that
wasn't why it ultimately went away.

------
kiba
Anyone want to explain to me like I am five, because I got no fricking idea
what it does and why would I want it?

~~~
nacs
> why would I want it

Well, the title says its shutting down so you probably don't want it. If you
don't know what Parse is, this news doesn't affect you.

------
squid3
The open source Parse Server offers more benefits than hosted parse.com. Many
of the benefits are outlined in this blog post:
[http://blog.parse.com/announcements/what-is-parse-
server/](http://blog.parse.com/announcements/what-is-parse-server/) Whatever
you are building with Parse Server, Nodechef can help you get there faster.
[https://www.nodechef.com/parse-server](https://www.nodechef.com/parse-server)

~~~
coupdejarnac
Are you a nodechef cofounder by any chance? I host with nodechef and am happy
with them so far.

~~~
squid3
Yes, I am one of the co-founders. Thanks for hosting with us.

------
ebbv
The Parse folks seem to have handled this reasonably well but this is the
perfect illustration of why building your own application around a third party
service like this is not a pure win. There is a tradeoff and it can in fact
bite you.

~~~
gamache
It's a shame so many people think of the Data Access Object design pattern as
something only Java developers should be using. Using DAOs to provide
database-agnostic access to your data takes a few moments more at first, but
then when you need to move data from $DB_X to $DB_Y, there's a lot less
wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Mediocre link on the topic:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_access_object](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_access_object)

~~~
ebbv
I'm not sure what your point is. Do you mean that if only people used DAOs
then Parse shutting down wouldn't be a problem? It only encapsulates the
problem. You still need to go through a process to switch from Parse to
MariaDB or whatever else you switch to. You just don't have to rewrite your
whole application.

I'm in favor of DAOs and use them myself but they don't have anything to do
with what I was talking about.

~~~
gamache
You made the point that the tradeoff can bite you. I mentioned DAOs as a way
to make that bite less painful. Not a hard connection to make.

~~~
ebbv
That's what I assumed, but it wasn't totally clear that was your intention.

Like I said it does help but it's not a panacea.

------
cridenour
Why do I feel like this post is getting brigaded by Sashido?

~~~
iammiles
Because it is. Makes me begin to regret my decision of migrating my parse
server to them, but I will say that they did make it easy to migrate over and
answered my questions promptly.

------
overcast
What an incredible journey!

------
sammcgrail
I read this as "Paris is shutting down today"

I guess my parser is offline too...

------
helloanand
Check out the Parse Migration Guide to migrate away without any downtime -
[http://www.parsemigrationguide.com/](http://www.parsemigrationguide.com/)

