
Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse? - sashthebash
https://medium.com/@s2o/they-never-wanted-to-host-your-app-the-real-reasons-why-parse-shut-down-6ec3d7d5c53c#.h9jgsb29c
======
exelius
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
company's tech stack at the mercy of a profit-driven company that may abandon
them.

In the end though, I just don't think Parse offered enough over existing
solutions like AWS and Azure. Both those ecosystems can easily scale from low-
end mobile apps (like Parse was designed for) or huge enterprise apps.

It also didn't help that Facebook was unable to onboard a single major IoT
vendor onto Parse - IMO this was probably the reason they ended up killing it.
If there was zero interest from existing players in the industry, they may
have figured there's not much of a market there.

~~~
nostrademons
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 company that experiences hyper-growth ever does
this. Instead, the founder chooses a tech stack based on whatever he knows
best and will let him write a v1 quickest - whether it be Java (Google), Perl
(EBay), PHP (Facebook), or Common Lisp (Reddit). The first few employees
collectively say that the founder is an idiot, choose a different tech stack
(usually whatever's hot right now - probably Go or Node.js at this time,
Python or Rails in 2005), and rewrite the whole product. They hire an
experienced VP who says that the first few employees are idiots, chooses a
different tech stack (often the tried and true enterprise favorites of C++ or
Java), and dictates that everyone rewrite the product. Eventually, managers
with more recent experience in that language get hired, who collectively say
that that VP was an idiot, and the _real_ way to do C++/Java is with Guice,
Boost, C++11, etc, and rewrite the product that way. Development grinds to a
halt, and the company buys a bunch of hot startups who wrote in whatever
language they were familiar with, who are technical idiots but managed to
build a product that everyone likes.

In this context, Parse and other BaaS providers makes a lot of sense. You can
get your v1 product out there really quick, get customer feedback, improve it,
take VC, and hire lots of programmers to call you an idiot and rewrite your
product into something saner. Then you get bought, everybody at the new
company thinks you're an idiot, but you have at least cashed out. Or you don't
get bought and hire a VP who'll force you to rewrite your product, but at this
stage you have so much of a market lead that it doesn't matter, and the BaaS
got you to the point where you have the resources to free yourself of it.

(I wonder if I'll end up tripping some HN flamewar auto-detector with the
number of times I've said "idiot" in this post...)

~~~
jt2190
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 reasonable trade off
between current needs and future-proofing.)

~~~
nostrademons
I agree, but the actual words used when this discussion comes up very often
are much closer to "What idiot designed this shit?" rather than "My coworkers
made architectural choices based on facts that are no longer true". (At Google
the latter was perhaps more common, but I've heard the former in startups a
lot more frequently, and certainly on Internet message boards.) I'm
perspective-taking on the part of all sides; I hope that it's apparent from
each side being called an idiot in turn and the company succeeding in the end
that I don't actually believe any of the participants are idiots.

~~~
grrowl
Once the next round of developers join, the scrappy MVP has usually been
pushed far enough to be messy and maintainability becomes an issue. Seeing
that might trigger the "idiot" reaction, The old guard appreciate how far it's
come.

------
gkoberger
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 source Parse clone they released going and be back to new. Seems better
to deal with that now than to have slowed down initial development by building
everything in-house.

~~~
Jare
> 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, it looks to me like the Parse Server is a very
limited subset of the real Parse)

~~~
lacker
If you have a small app and don't need to be careful about scaling issues,
then 2 hours is pretty accurate I think. It's trickier when you have a large
app, because with Parse Server you do need to handle your own databases and
production environment. So I think some of the larger apps are either going to
need to hire some devops folks, or make an arrangement with higher-service
providers like ObjectRocket.

It has been less than a week, though, so we will see.

------
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!

------
tsunamifury
Click-bait speculation.

Word in the industry was that after two failed attempts to move from AWS to
Facebooks metal failed spectacularly and massive attrition after vesting -- no
one was left to make it work and Facebook lost the will to keep going.

The more important lesson was that a failure to port a stack from AWS to FB
servers caused Facebook to take a $1B write-down. Startups should reconsider
their metal, as future acquirers will likely heed this lesson strongly.

~~~
lacker
Discouraging startups from using AWS is so strange, I had to look at your bio.
A Googler eh. Perhaps you have some ulterior motive to encourage people to
avoid the AWS stack, which is clearly becoming the infrastructure of choice
for this generation of startups?

~~~
jacoplane
Attacking his integrity seems kind of uncalled for.

------
dang
For what it's worth (and because someone said they were "hoping for an insider
leak"), here's what a genuine insider had to say about this article:

 _Just awful._

followed by:

 _I would write something but it would be so simplistic that nobody would
believe it._

Sorry it's anonymous, but it's the best I could squeeze out of them :)

~~~
danso
They can't just leave us hanging like that.

------
gaius
This "article" is just an ad, once you reach the last paragraph.

~~~
bduerst
Pretty much. It's fitting in with the trend of execs writing about buzzwords
to make the topics relevant to their startup offering.

------
deadlycrayon
Interesting insights until you realize that the author has a not so hidden
agenda for posting such an article.

------
kwhinnery
I don't think Parse's lead in this space ever evaporated. They went out as the
best-in-class MBaaS.

~~~
lacker
I agree with this! ;-)

------
derFunk
>Can you trust your platform of choice, or will they close shop on you
tomorrow?

I'm thinking about moving to IBM BlueMix with parts of my business and asking
myself the same question. What do you guys think? Will BlueMix still be there
in a couple of years (3,4)? I know nobody using it, but IBM is promoting it
quite aggressively, and it makes sense for me to have an alternative for both
self-made AWS clusters (IaaS) AND BaaS like Parse.

~~~
patwolf
I've been using BlueMix off and on since it was still Beta. I have noticed
that a lot of things, particularly in the BaaS space, have changed
significantly. While I'm sure BlueMix will be around, I doubt you'll make it 3
or 4 years without having to modify your code to accommodate changes to the
platform.

------
xaduha
There's also [http://www.28.io](http://www.28.io) (totally ungooglable name,
btw. Also know as "28msec").

[http://www.28.io/documentation/latest/data-
sources/](http://www.28.io/documentation/latest/data-sources/)

Not really comparable to Parse, even though they call it "Virtual Databases".
Sure, you can query everything, but what about updates?

EDIT: Looks like they have updates, but I couldn't find whether they support
similar uniform interface to updates as they have for queries (ideally XQuery
Update Facility).

[http://www.28.io/documentation/latest/modules/connectors](http://www.28.io/documentation/latest/modules/connectors)

------
mattiemass
I was hoping for an insider leak...

~~~
dang
We replaced the misleading and linkbait title with a representative sentence
from the article.

Submitters: the HN guidelines ask you not to use the original title of a post
when it is misleading or linkbait.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
draw_down
> Large mobile app developers such as mobile gaming companies mostly shunned
> its service, building in house custom solutions instead. Small to medium
> sized developers embraced its service, but had a much smaller propensity to
> spend.

As a developer, I want the platform I choose to rely on to be reliable and
unlikely to shut down. I also don't want to spend a lot of money on it. Hmm.
Hmmmmmm.

------
d0m
I still see a big market for a more powerful Parse. I think the whole
"infrastructure as a service" is now commodity and wouldn't be a good
competitive advantage, but the software orchestrating all the sys admin stuff
on top of _any_ IoT would be of tremendous value. The perfect solution would
connect all the great open-source building blocks into one "Good Enough Way".
I would totally pay for that, but I don't see how that service would stop
copycats. In a way, this is what Meteor is trying to get to. Embrace open-
source but deal and charge for the hard parts that nobody else is solving.

Ideally, there would be a generalized way to build scalable applications.
Similarly to how mostly everyone got behind React, it would be great to have
mostly everyone behind such a project. I'm sure it will happen, but I'm not
sure when it will. Right now there are hundreds of new libraries in the JS
ecosystem, but there are some clear converging trends. I think new languages
and libraries will always exist and be welcome, but it'd be great to have one
standard way based on years of experience. Similar to how other industries
stabilized (i.e. building bridge). I feel we'll be able to move so much faster
when we get to that point. Now, every programmer is reinventing the wheel and
keep doing the same mistakes that other programmers elsewhere are doing.

------
wpeterson
Outsourcing functionality or work makes a lot of sense for things that aren't
core to your business. If you're building a web or mobile app, backend
services should be core to your business.

It's a very different thing to write a web application or web services that
can run on many hosting platforms than to give responsibility for your entire
backend to a service provider.

------
th0ma5
How is Slack not also a house of cards like Parse?

~~~
tomatohs
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.

~~~
yelnatz
Slack _is not_ mission critical, you mean.

~~~
dev360
Oh noes, slack is down we can't deploy :(

------
kindlep
Wow, talk about another ad disguised as an article. Damn South Park was right!

------
mayyuen318
Interesting thought. In fact when I looked at the market of mBaaS, it is
interesting that most major competitors after Parse target the Entreprise
market, that echo with your 2nd checkbox.

------
conductr
They bought parse at a time when Facebook was struggling to do mobile right.
Parse had the talent. That was my initial thought when the acquisition went
down.

------
wahsd
Does anyone know if there is a list of the 60,000 apps that relied on Parse?
I'm just curious.

~~~
campers
Google this: site:parseapp.com

Thanks for the idea, might have to contact some of them about my Parse
replacement platform!

