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Wrong! Everything we build is on top of layers upon layers and not a single company/IT team has/can fully control all of them! So you suggest: build your own ba
by bikamonki 11y ago
Wrong! Everything we build is on top of layers upon layers and not a single company/IT team has/can fully control all of them! So you suggest: build your own backend API and run it on a VPS/Container/whatever. Do you have full control on the hardware? The virtual machines? The vendor's infrastructure? Let's move a layer up. Do you have full control over the framework you used? The database engine? Does the sum of knowledge/experience in your team guarantees full control on all these layers? Under a security threat who provides the patches? Your team? Do you run your own mail server? Did you code our own OS?
This is rethorical of course, all the answers are no.
What exactly is wrong about trusting one more layer to 'experts'?
Not all dev teams can afford a backend ninja just as they cannot afford a network admin or a telecom engineer. Companies like Parse are on the right track, they provide a much needed service.
I've been on this trade long enough to witness the transition of companies hosting webservers in-house to realizing a dedicated server made more sense (one team of experts managing many machines), then VPS, then containers....then BAAS.
- nodamage 11y agoYour reductio ad absurdum is not particularly convincing. I draw the line at exactly the BaaS layer specifically because of the high risk of these providers pulling the rug out from under you. If you disagree, fair enough, but I feel pretty bad right now for the poor developer who decided to adopt StackMob, then migrated over to Parse when StackMob shut down, and now has to migrate once again. Fool me once...
- bikamonki 11y agoYou'll move that line eventually. Datacenters were a hard problem to solve a decade ago. Now its (almost) trivial. Virtual clouds were a buzzword less than two years ago. Now they are huge and successful businesses. Same path for BAAS.
- nodamage 11y agoThat's possible. But the current model of "give us money, use our code, and we'll host your data" is pretty clearly broken.
- bikamonki 11y agoWhy?
- nodamage 11y agoDoesn't seeing two of the most successful BaaS services get shut down after acquisition raise a red flag for you?
- bikamonki 11y agoYes of course but there may be other explanations other than 'a broken business model'.
- spdionis 11y agoEverything breaks at "host your data".
- bikamonki 11y agoAny hosting/cloud service provider 'hosts your data'. I'm curious if you run your webservers in-house?
- spdionis 11y agoIt's a different level of abstraction. They provide me with computers not data hosting. Theoretically they can have access to the software and the data on those computers but in practice they don't touch that and everything is completely in my control.