
Show HN: CloudBoost – Open-Source Parse, Firebase and Algolia Combined into One - nawazdhandala
https://github.com/CloudBoost/cloudboost
======
sapeien
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 throttle
this). The pricing is also exceptionally poor, a fast HTTP implementation may
respond to 250k requests per second vs a month, and 5 GB of storage for $50 a
month...

They seem to not have any sort of release strategy and the readme states to
clone their repository. It would require pulling from their repo to update it
as a dependency. There are also absolutely no tests, so you don't know if the
latest commit is working or contains some work in progress or not. The signup
process seems to be needlessly difficult, one needs to manually craft an HTTP
request to some endpoint with some payload.

The "AI to build exceptional apps" pitch is vague. I can think of some
possible cases such as automatic indexing based on querying patterns, but this
is just speculative. I wouldn't trust it unless I know what it does.

~~~
nawazdhandala
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 this.

\- I completely agree, we dont have a release strategy and we need to work on
it. You'll see GitHub releases every week within few weeks from now. Thank you
for the feedback.

\- We have a Docker implementation which will make your sign up process
easier. Please check :
[https://github.com/cloudboost/docker](https://github.com/cloudboost/docker)

\- One of the visions of the product is to learn how your app uses the service
and how your app queries the db - and auto optimize data between databases, so
you never have to think about storing your data in different types of
databases ever again.

~~~
rawrmaan
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.

~~~
skinp
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...

~~~
nawazdhandala
I completely agree. :)

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relics443
On their website [1], they make it look like WhatsApp, Slack, and Instagram
are all using their service, when in reality it's their own implementation of
"similar" services.

Seems fishy.

[1] [https://www.cloudboost.io/](https://www.cloudboost.io/)

~~~
nodesocket
While true, I think you're nit-picking. They've clearly put a ton of effort
into the project (code, docs, website), why is there something fishy or
malicious?

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
I agree with this. It clearly says "Checkout the world's most popular apps
rebuilt on CloudBoost".

It would rather be a disservice to users if they obscured these projects by
getting rid of those icons.

~~~
nawazdhandala
It said "Checkout the world's most popular apps built on CloudBoost" before.
We just fixed it.

~~~
misterhtmlcss
I like your integrity man. Even after you fixed it you own the error when
other people question the original comment. Good on you. Ownership,
transparency and integrity are key to a service of this magnitude.

FYI. I do more front-end work and I'm starting to contribute more to open
source. Is your website on a repo? If so, may I contribute some PRs to it
that'll improve your website? I'll make really small ones so it's easier to
absorb. Let me know if that is doable.

Ps. I'll be checking your product out btw since I like your attitude on HN and
I bet on people not products.

~~~
nawazdhandala
Thank you so much for your kind words. Yes, our website is on a repo here :
[https://github.com/cloudboost/home](https://github.com/cloudboost/home). PR's
are a LOT appreciated. Please also feel free to write me anytime at nawaz [at]
cloudboost [dot] io

------
nodesocket
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](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 like cloud
providers.

An example of pricing I would implement might look like $10 per GB of storage
and $0.15 every 1k of API calls.

Thus a smallish example application that uses 2 GB of storage and makes
500,000 API calls a month would pay $95 / month.

~~~
nawazdhandala
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.

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

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

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skrebbel
Algolia's pitch is "much better results than you'd get from the average open-
source search tool", not "hosted ElasticSearch". How does CloudBoost stack up?
What special sauce makes this an open-source Algolia and not an ElasticSearch
wrapper?

~~~
nawazdhandala
Algolia is technically an ElasticSearch wrapper. We are too. :)

~~~
Sphax
That is not true [https://stackshare.io/posts/how-algolia-built-their-
realtime...](https://stackshare.io/posts/how-algolia-built-their-realtime-
search-as-a-service-product)

~~~
nawazdhandala
You're right. Their API looks awfully similar to ES though.

------
mentos
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.

~~~
nawazdhandala
I completely agree!

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anilgulecha
Has someone who has also used Deepstream.io compare the two?

~~~
nawazdhandala
Disclosure: I'm from CloudBoost team.

I think Deepstream does Realtime and CloudBoost does a lot more - like Search,
ACL's, RealTime, BLOB, JSON, and a whole lot more. You can also check out :
[https://cloudboost.io/compare](https://cloudboost.io/compare)

------
cyberferret
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.

~~~
sapeien
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.

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

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redox_
What do you guys use for the search? Regular MongoDB features? How do you
handle typo-tolerance and prefix search?

~~~
nawazdhandala
We currently use MongoDB Search for search, but are planning to integrate ES
in about a month from now to make your search much better and faster. Let me
know if this helps.

------
0natcer
This looks pretty awesome. Hope I can try it out in a project some time
soon...

~~~
nawazdhandala
Thank you! Let us know your thoughts. :)

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themihai
The description is misleading. Once you check the docs it becomes clear that
it's not a drop-in algolia replacement.(i.e API comp)

~~~
nawazdhandala
Thank you for pointing this out. Yes, we're working on making our API's
comparable with Algolia. We've implemented basic search now and are working on
advanced search API's.

~~~
themihai
Compatibility with Algolia would be a great stand alone product in itself.

------
Gys
'We use AI to build exceptional apps for you.'

Can you elaborate on how you use AI to build my apps ? I have a hard time
imagining this.

~~~
duncanawoods
The definition of AI these days is "any activity performed on or near a
computer"...

------
srikondoji
Cool. I definitely can see a lot of effort that went into it.

