12 ms·

Show HN: CloudBoost – Open-Source Parse, Firebase and Algolia Combined into One

113 points by nawazdhandala 10y ago

Turbots 10y ago
Every link in the readme just points to the Docker installation. While I agree that making it runnable in Docker makes it runnable practically everywhere, but all the various links and "Run it on ..." buttons make it seems they are tailored for those clouds...
anilgulecha 10y ago
Has someone who has also used Deepstream.io compare the two?
- nawazdhandala 10y ago
  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
redox_ 10y ago
What do you guys use for the search? Regular MongoDB features? How do you handle typo-tolerance and prefix search?
- nawazdhandala 10y ago
  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.
skrebbel 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Algolia is technically an ElasticSearch wrapper. We are too. :)
  - Sphax 10y ago
    That is not true https://stackshare.io/posts/how-algolia-built-their-realtime-search-as-a-service-product https://stackshare.io/posts/how-algolia-built-their-realtime...
    - nawazdhandala 10y ago
      You're right. Their API looks awfully similar to ES though.
relics443 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      It said "Checkout the world's most popular apps built on CloudBoost" before. We just fixed it.
      - misterhtmlcss 10y ago
        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 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nodesocket 10y ago
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 10y ago
  I'm Nawaz from CloudBoost. 100% agree. The idea was when you reach a $99 plan, we install CloudBoost on your own Cloud. But a pay as you go service makes a lot more sense. If you want to install the service on your own machine, you can always check out our enterprise / open source options. Thank you for your feedback again. This helped a lot.
  - daddykotex 10y ago
    Good stuff out there. One suggestion I'd make is that you put a curl snippet where you show how to create apps. Something like: ``` SERVER=http://localhost http://localhost APPID=test SECUREKEY=key curl "$SERVER/app/$APPID" \ -d "{ \"secureKey\": \"$SECUREKEY\" }" ```
    - nawazdhandala 10y ago
      Great idea! :) We'll get the docs updated. :)
themihai 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Compatibility with Algolia would be a great stand alone product in itself.
cyberferret 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Thank you for the feedback. We're working to optimize the site + dependencies. :)
Gys 10y ago
'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 10y ago
  The definition of AI these days is "any activity performed on or near a computer"...
- nawazdhandala 10y ago
  "Today, apps need many data stores - from database to search index, to cache and more. Our AI algorithm learns about your app and auto configures these for you so we don't have to which saves 50% or more of your time."
sapeien 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - whyileft 10y ago
    > There are also absolutely no tests Could you address this? I rarely trust anything in active development without any test coverage. So maybe I'm missing it somewhere?
0natcer 10y ago
This looks pretty awesome. Hope I can try it out in a project some time soon...
- nawazdhandala 10y ago
  Thank you! Let us know your thoughts. :)
mentos 10y ago
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 10y ago
  I completely agree!
srikondoji 10y ago
Cool. I definitely can see a lot of effort that went into it.

113 points by nawazdhandala 10y ago

Every link in the readme just points to the Docker installation. While I agree that making it runnable in Docker makes it runnable practically everywhere, but all the various links and "Run it on ..." buttons make it seems they are tailored for those clouds...

anilgulecha 10y ago

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

nawazdhandala 10y ago
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

redox_ 10y ago

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

nawazdhandala 10y ago
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.

skrebbel 10y ago

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 10y ago
Algolia is technically an ElasticSearch wrapper. We are too. :)
- Sphax 10y ago
  That is not true https://stackshare.io/posts/how-algolia-built-their-realtime-search-as-a-service-product https://stackshare.io/posts/how-algolia-built-their-realtime...
  - nawazdhandala 10y ago
    You're right. Their API looks awfully similar to ES though.

relics443 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    It said "Checkout the world's most popular apps built on CloudBoost" before. We just fixed it.
    - misterhtmlcss 10y ago
      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 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nodesocket 10y ago

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 10y ago
I'm Nawaz from CloudBoost. 100% agree. The idea was when you reach a $99 plan, we install CloudBoost on your own Cloud. But a pay as you go service makes a lot more sense. If you want to install the service on your own machine, you can always check out our enterprise / open source options. Thank you for your feedback again. This helped a lot.
- daddykotex 10y ago
  Good stuff out there. One suggestion I'd make is that you put a curl snippet where you show how to create apps. Something like: ``` SERVER=http://localhost http://localhost APPID=test SECUREKEY=key curl "$SERVER/app/$APPID" \ -d "{ \"secureKey\": \"$SECUREKEY\" }" ```
  - nawazdhandala 10y ago
    Great idea! :) We'll get the docs updated. :)

themihai 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Compatibility with Algolia would be a great stand alone product in itself.

cyberferret 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Thank you for the feedback. We're working to optimize the site + dependencies. :)

Gys 10y ago

'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 10y ago
The definition of AI these days is "any activity performed on or near a computer"...
nawazdhandala 10y ago
"Today, apps need many data stores - from database to search index, to cache and more. Our AI algorithm learns about your app and auto configures these for you so we don't have to which saves 50% or more of your time."

sapeien 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
- whyileft 10y ago
  > There are also absolutely no tests Could you address this? I rarely trust anything in active development without any test coverage. So maybe I'm missing it somewhere?

0natcer 10y ago

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

nawazdhandala 10y ago
Thank you! Let us know your thoughts. :)

mentos 10y ago

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 10y ago
I completely agree!

srikondoji 10y ago

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