19 ms·

Parse is shutting down today

435 points by jpdlla 10y ago

gfosco 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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?
  - barnaclejive 10y ago
    I have created a few apps using Parse.com, one of them successful enough to take the additional time/cost hit to migrate and host myself using the Parse-Server project. The open source project is great and I appreciate the effort that went into making sure we didn't all get (totally) screwed. Would I use Parse-Server for a new project? Probably not. The state of the BaaS options out there has changed/improved significantly since Parse.com was a thing.
    - jeyoor 10y ago
      Which BaaS options are recommended now?
      - ma2rten 10y ago
        I haven't used it, but firebase is popular.
        mignev 10y ago
        Yes it's google behind ... but you should rewrite the whole application. That's why I respect Facebook about their decision to opensource the Parse Server. The is the beginning of the Open Backend world. With Parse Open Source everybody will get Personal MBaaS :)
      - primitivesuave 10y ago
        I second the Firebase recommendation. Facebook killed off their BaaS acquisition while Google doubled down on theirs. If you prefer open-source, Horizon (http://horizon.io/ http://horizon.io/) is a great alternative to Firebase but does not have many of the key features like file storage and iOS/Android SDKs.
        hackerboos 10y ago
        Firebase has a few issues. Take a look at this video and tell me this query and the required data denormalization is acceptable. https://t.co/xd1KUPc8xY https://t.co/xd1KUPc8xY
        bfrog 10y ago
        They must be using something akin to Cassandra to require something like that
        pier25 10y ago
        Yep data modelling and querying capabilities is a real deal breaker in Firebase. Something as simple as filtering by 2 or more values becomes ridiculously tedious. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26700924/query-based-on-multiple-where-clauses-in-firebase http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26700924/query-based-on-m...
        primitivesuave 10y ago
        I completely agree that on its own, the querying functionality can be quite tedious for anything complex. I linked to this solution on the comment above as well: https://github.com/davideast/Querybase https://github.com/davideast/Querybase
        pier25 10y ago
        > Querybase is in an experiment and not for production Also since Firebase doesn't allow more than one filtering field with orderByChild(...) I'm guessing Querybase will do all the work on the client. This is less than ideal since the data has to be downloaded first.
      - harrisreynolds 10y ago
        Backendless is a solid option: https://backendless.com/ https://backendless.com/
        mignev 10y ago
        With Backendless you should rewrite your apps, which is not so good :) Anyways ... what will happen when Backendless decide to shut down?
        _ao789 10y ago
        Then you too will shutdown xD
      - jordangonen 10y ago
        Scaphold (https://scaphold.io/ https://scaphold.io/) is a super neat BAAS built on GraphQL!
      - george_batski 10y ago
        You should try one of these BaaS Firebase Back4app Backendless
    - Liveanimalcams 10y ago
      but we still got screwed and I still hate facebook because of it.
    - Myztiq 10y ago
      I used to work at Kinvey, they've got a pretty good product geared towards integrating with whatever you've got to connect with. They have always been security conscious, even have HIPAA support now IIRC. Happy to answer any questions, or get some current devs there into the conversation to help out.
  - quaz3l 10y ago
    I used it for a new project I started 6 months ago. We've since transferred to AWS and a Express/Node.js project. However the Parse Server open source project is very well maintained and supported. I would recommend it for any quick prototype project you need a backend, but don't need it to do anything fancy.
  - gfosco 10y ago
    I think it depends on your level of expertise and the requirements of your project. Having Parse Server as something you can set up in a few minutes on a VPS and start building a client-server app is great. The integration via the various SDKs is incredible, and it takes a long time to build something like that out. All the available options have their tradeoffs, but I think having the source and an interested community is a great pro in the Parse column.
  - alysson_b4a 10y ago
    Erik, I recommend use Parse Open source to any kind of App project that needs a robust backend. It is awesome, simple to install and to maintain.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    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.
    - ShaneWilton 10y ago
      > I think the way it's created makes it very, very easy to make bad security choices. I can sympathize with this. I work on a dynamic API security scanner, and the vast majority of the Parse APIs I've scanned have either used API keys with full read/write permissions on the DB, or have left the database in development mode, essentially allowing anyone with an API key to modify the schema of the database. Parse was a very cool product, but most setups I've seen didn't take advantage of the (sometimes hard to find) security features Parse provides.
    - jkestner 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        > 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.
  - ojr 10y ago
    for mvp I would say yes, parse-server provides security (ACLs/permissions) and performant database query helpers out of the box, its a battle-tested abstraction layer to mongodb, I had to make some workarounds to work for my specific usecase but just like any other framework it has it pros and cons, marketing and getting new users is the bottleneck for me not the database
- SmokyBourbon 10y ago
  Missing documentation: what the hell Parse is.
- mignev 10y ago
  Hi Fosco ... Thanks to you @flovilmart and the other heroes who made this possible :) You guys are aweosme!
- marknadal 10y ago
  I second the sentiment that Parse has done a good job of shutting the platform down and giving users warning/notice. I hope the Open Source version takes off (looks like it has, with 12K stars!). As a shameless plug though, there are other Open Source alternatives though - we wrote a migration guide for ours: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/Migrating-from-Parse https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/Migrating-from-Parse .
- alysson_b4a 10y ago
  Awesome Fosco! The open source community has already 12k+ stars on Github and is growing fast. Thank you for all the work and collaboration! You rock guys!!!!
- trumbitta2 10y ago
  And nowhere in there I was able to find what's Parse and what does the open-source Parse Server do.
  - Groxx 10y ago
    Huh. Yeah, I dove around a bit, browsed the wiki, etc, and so far all I've seen is the equivalent of "an open source version of the Parse backend". No description anywhere that I can see about what it does or why you should care (unless you're already on Parse, of course). IIRC the Parse homepage used to have this, but ever since the shutdown notice (so, for the past year) the homepage has largely been useless.
    - taneq 10y ago
      So many posts on HN are like this, assuming that every obscure webservice is common knowledge. "Jabberwocky has reached version 1.1! Performance increased by 30%, users must migrate from 1.0 by the 12th. Use Jabberwocky in your business now! New users get a free trial!" OK that's nice but what tf is it and why should I care?
      - mypalmike 10y ago
        Yesterday I built a 100M user social network using Jabberwocky. It took me just 25 minutes, bro, and now I've retired to my own private Caribbean island.
        jacobush 10y ago
        So it's you on my Caribbean lawn! Now get off it.
  - bjacobel 10y ago
    I'd assume the main goal of the open-source Parse Server is to provide some support for previous users of Parse? Who would already know what Parse does. Attracting new users unfamiliar with the technology seems at best secondary ( and possibly, unwelcome) to the Parse Server community now.
- franciscop 10y ago
  That cannot work at all! See inside /bin/parse-server: require("../lib/cli/parse-server"); The same with the package.json, it points to /lib/index.js. However there is no /lib folder, apparently its name is /src. So there is basically no possible way that is even able to run. How is this possible? Either someone linked /src to /lib (doesn't make sense) or they changed the name of the folder and didn't change anything else.
  - bjacobel 10y ago
    Files in src/ are run through Babel and output to lib/ as a prepublish step. The version that you download from NPM contains a lib/ directory. https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server/blob/master/package.json#L71 https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server/blob/master/pa...
    - franciscop 10y ago
      That makes sense, I would have put them in /dist though
mmastrac 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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-facebook-parse-85-million-20130425 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/26/business/la-fi-tn-fa...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- dkonofalski 10y ago
  Did you vocalize any of these issues anywhere? I have never used Parse but have been looking at the open-source version. What are the many, many glaring bugs and problems you're referring to?
  - jcoffland 10y ago
    We would all go crazy trying to report all the bugs we found in every piece of software out there these days. When there are too many or something is too difficult to use, you move on. To a large extent, finding bugs is the responsibility of the developers. When users submit bug reports, good ones at least, they should be thanked. My point is, as a developer, you can't blame the users for not reporting bugs.
mcescalante 10y ago
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
- valgaze 10y ago
  They did some extraordinary work Very interesting interview with Parse founder in its heyday: https://soundcloud.com/heavybit/caveat-founder-ep-1-featuring-ilya-sukhar-fred-stevens-smith https://soundcloud.com/heavybit/caveat-founder-ep-1-featurin... On finding an interesting market @ 13:30: Evidently the Parse folks discovered they were dealing with an agency building an application for the Food Network. The agency needed SLAs/enterprise contracts and Parse found a $$ customer base
- lacker 10y ago
  Thanks mcescalante, we appreciate the kind words!
- jamesjyu 10y ago
  Thank you, mcescalante. We did our best to make the transition as smooth as possible.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    That would likely be overly onerous...what if they use licensed 3rd party components?
ebbv 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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.
dbancajas 10y ago
can someone tldr us on what happened to parse?
- alvarosevilla95 10y ago
  Facebook bought it.
- helloanand 10y ago
  facebook shut it down
- gamache 10y ago
  Founded 2011, sold to Facebook for $85M in 2013, folded by Facebook in 2016 (though the software was released as open source).
  - j_s 10y ago
    Technically I believe the software was re-implemented as open source; the initial release didn't measure up compared to what Parse offered but the project has grown since then.
- jeron 10y ago
  Facebook decided it wasn't worth it to continue maintaining Parse so they shut it down and open sourced all the code. Simple as that.
- newsat13 10y ago
  I am curious to know why facebook bought it in the first place
  - jaypaulynice 10y ago
    Pbly talent grab and also it gave them a view of up and coming apps they could target for acquisition: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-facebook-acquired-parse-for-app-acquisitions-2013-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/why-facebook-acquired-parse-f...
rawrmaan 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - jkarneges 10y ago
    Well, he said "from a developer's perspective" ...
  - evan_ 10y ago
    > Why do you think Parse was a failure in the first place? Because the title of this post is "Parse.com is shutting down today".
    - mofirouz 10y ago
      Shutting down is not the same as failure
      - jerf 10y ago
        But it is a reasonable enough definition of it that we should be able to apply the principle of charity to calling it a failure, no? It is not something anyone would mistake for "success" on its own terms, even if the people involved did OK for themselves.
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
        It really depends on the goal. It's a success if the goal was to build something to be IPO'd or acquired for benefit of investors and founders. It was a big success in that regard. It's a failure if the goal was mainly to benefit developers. That wasn't the main goal. Incentives like this are why I don't use VC-funded stuff unless I have a fall-back option. Risks also apply to proprietary software in general but many suppliers are more interested than startups are in sucking money out of you for long-term. Market leaders stick around longer.
helloanand 10y ago
Check out the Parse Migration Guide to migrate away without any downtime - http://www.parsemigrationguide.com/ http://www.parsemigrationguide.com/
helloanand 10y ago
Migrate away from Parse without any downtime - http://www.parsemigrationguide.com/ http://www.parsemigrationguide.com/
samblr 10y ago
What are the founders next up to ? Interesting to hear about it.
- lacker 10y ago
  Ilya's a VC now. http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/09/parse-cofounder-and-y-combinator-partner-ilya-sukhar-joins-matrix-partners/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/09/parse-cofounder-and-y-comb... James and I are still working at Facebook, on other projects.
  - samblr 10y ago
    Cool. How big was team when parse was bought by Facebook ?
    - lacker 10y ago
      24 people
deleted 10y ago
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parseuser 10y ago
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.
- jtmarmon 10y ago
  uhhh...sorry to say but I don't think you're getting that data out anymore. >When your app is disabled, you will not be able to access the data browser or export any data, and your applications will no longer be able to access the Parse API.
  - parseuser 10y ago
    The apps were not disabled. The export feature hasn't been working because of a bug on their end. It seams like the claim that Parse "firmly believes in data portability" is complete BS.
    - HectorRamos 10y ago
      The data export feature was replaced by the database migration tool we launched on January 28 last year. We highly recommend using the database migration tool as this will ensure that all of your data is copied over and synced to your new database prior to switching traffic over. Tons of apps have migrated in the past year using the db migration tool.
      - parseuser 10y ago
        It's terrible that you aren't allowing data to be exported anymore. You shouldn't need to setup a server and go through the migration process just to get your data out. The prior export feature that allowed data to be exported in JSON format was great, but that was left broken without any explantation.
- lacker 10y ago
overcast 10y ago
What an incredible journey!
imns 10y ago
Ah yes, the day that so many unsupported apps stop working.
- giarc 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    I've seen a notification like that, but it had to do with an App not being compiled for 64 bit architecture.
bennythenerd 10y ago
Sashido is a solid alternative for a quick and easy implementation for those who need something similar to Parse.com style services
- castis 10y ago
  Is Sashido using the parse server for their army of HN spam accounts?
  - grzm 10y ago
    Please don't call out other HN members as shills or spam accounts. If you suspect that such activity is going on, do contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer. They actively respond to issues like this.
    - castis 10y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you could point me to wherever it says don't ask others about their obvious brigading tactics I'll gladly adjust my tone, thanks.
      - grzm 10y ago
        I'm not sure if it's in the guidelines (and you're right, I don't see it there). I've seen 'dang and 'sctb bring it up multiple times. One such example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242889#13243600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242889#13243600 I'll note that 'dang is also pretty consistent about including the "without evidence" caveat as well, which I admit there does appear to be plenty. That said, contacting the mods (which I already did) is going to be the most effective way of stopping the behavior: they've got more information available and can not only get rid of the comments, but the accounts as well. Comments such as your tend to add to the noise, and unfortunately unlikely to stop the spamming. Don't misunderstand me: I'm frustrated by it as well. Edit to add: 'sctb responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13524377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13524377
squid3 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Are you a nodechef cofounder by any chance? I host with nodechef and am happy with them so far.
  - squid3 10y ago
    Yes, I am one of the co-founders. Thanks for hosting with us.
- mignev 10y ago
  There are a lot of comparisons between the Parse Open Source and Parse.com as a service ...
  - johns 10y ago
    Hey maybe tone it down with the sock puppet accounts.
bh13731 10y ago
Quick... everyone run to www.graph.cool !! It's parse but for GraphQL!
- ruslan_talpa 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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!
- schickling 10y ago
  Thanks a lot for the shoutout, bh13731. The sunset of Parse and the rise of GraphQL was indeed one of the reasons for us to start working on Graphcool. We have a lot of customers who migrated from Parse to our platform which was a good usability benchmark for us. In general GraphQL provides many advantages over a traditional REST like API provided by most BaaS. It frees you from the need for proprietary SDKs and reduces vendor lock-in. Here is a quick way how you can get started: https://www.graph.cool/docs/quickstart https://www.graph.cool/docs/quickstart
Mankhool 10y ago
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?
- GalyaTitova 10y ago
  You can use Parse Server Hosting providers such as sashido.io so you don't have to make many code changes.
  - Mankhool 10y ago
    Cool. Thanks! I already let all my data go, but it will be great to get my app going again.
    - bdcravens 10y ago
      Read the rest of this thread before you transfer there; you'll find that all the posts are by new users and were flagged. I won't say it's brigading, but use your own judgement to decide whether this comment was legit.
mignev 10y ago
I think you should try https://www.sashido.io https://www.sashido.io. Please share your feedback afterward.
- shamimalpha 10y ago
  We migrated to Sashido about a month ago. Migration was pretty painless. There was one brief outage lasting a couple of hours but other than that the experience has been positive. Beats having to rewrite the app or deal with running own Parse instance (at this early stage of our startup).
- timanrebel 10y ago
  I have been using Sashido for at least 6 months now. In the beginning I started out trying to host my own Parse servers, since I really liked the concept of Parse as Open Source as well. But running it yourself ruined the whole benefit of Parse.com. As a startup it is not my core business to run a mobile backend a first, but to create an awesome user experience in the mobile app. Sashido's pricing model is also clearer than Parse.com's, charging per request instead of request/sec. Yu also HAVE to pay at least $4.95 that makes it less likely for them to shutdown due to lack of revenue. I can really recommend sashabdo! Also if you've not been using Parse.com.
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13523203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13523203 and marked it off-topic.
hushhash 10y ago
I definitely recommend Sashi.do as a hosting alternative. Migration was a breeze and the product just works seamlessly!! keep doing a great job guys!
csmajorfive 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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
deanclatworthy 10y ago
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?
- turblety 10y ago
  I've definitely noticed of a lot of these companies that shutdown/close their doors, that it takes a long time to understand what they actually did/do. A businesses front page should explain what they do to the lay person. Even if your product is aimed at developers, most of the time it's not them buying, but their managers who will not want to guess what it is the company does. Just 1 paragraph about what you do is all it takes.
  - jcoffland 10y ago
    This is so basic. It's amazing how many projects fail to do this. A common one I've noticed is to have a news feed or blog roll right at the top of the front page. It makes lots of sense to everyone involved in the project but none to potential new users.
- reilly3000 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
lubolr 10y ago
Yes, it was sad news when they announced it. I have migrated to http://www.sashido.io http://www.sashido.io last months and they are fine. Look it from the brighter perspective it is open source now and this gives much more possibilities :)
jtaguinaga 10y ago
The team at Sashido.io was helpful every step of the way. Any bump in the road I had would be answered right away. Even if that bump was just me being paranoid. Go team Sashido.io!
deleted 10y ago
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noelh-4thdown 10y ago
Migrated ~25 apps in the last 2 weeks to Sashido.io and the customer support was incredibly swift! It's like they are constantly online and were prepared for this heavy shift.
noelh-4thdown 10y ago
Migrated ~25 apps in the last 2 weeks to Sashido.io and the customer support was incredibly swift! It's like they are constantly online and were prepared for this heavy shift.
vonklaus 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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".
walterfernandes 10y ago
I'm trying sashido.io and it is the easiest way to migrate Parse projects! I'm really enjoying that!
walterfernandes 10y ago
I'm trying sashido.io and it is the easiest way to migrate Parse projects! I'm really enjoying that!
bikamonki 10y ago
On the shadow of one of the two major BAAS providers shutting down, I still do not understand the hate towards BAAS. There are billions of real life applications out there that could benefit from a BAAS provider that allows developers to put together a production-ready app very fast, reliably and without the need to worry about managing a server. I simply see BAAS as just a higher level of abstraction on top of a VPS/container. I'd like to thank the guys that built Parse.com, it is an awesome product and I hope this shutdown does not move the industry in the opposite direction, BAAS companies should continue to develop and improve their products. I should add that after the shutdown I went shopping around for migration and found Sashido.io to be a good option. Migration was automatic and I just needed to change the API URL of my apps to get them going. Zero downtime.
parseopensource 10y ago
The time has come ... and we think that https://www.sashido.io https://www.sashido.io is the best alternative to Parse.com. Even more they have best support ever! Also they love their customers!
pivanov 10y ago
I personally believe in Open Source, so I think everybody who want to build mobile app with backend today should use Parse Server. It's open source, no shutdown threat and will become a standard. This is in my opinion and that's why we've build www.SashiDo.io
- kalat 10y ago
  Migrating from Parse to Sashido has been a great experience so far, I haven't had any issue and everyone there is really nice, launching the new version today so we'll see! def recommend em.
vning93 10y ago
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_ 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
    - vning93 10y ago
      Great point. It is an inevitable concern with any hosted data platform. Though we do try our best to make your data as transparent as possible and are coming up with more and more ways so you can have tons of control over your data.
MaverickAgile 10y ago
We was parse.com lovers for many years and we did a lot of projects.. After January 2016 we turned to firebase as new BaaS but you need to rewrite a lot of code and change the way you catch events and actions. In November 2016 we discovered https://www.sashido.io https://www.sashido.io and we tried all of their services and support. Today we are happy client of SaShido dashboard, we can use all of parse.com github opensource sdk and SaShido is growing on new great options like liveQueries.. So we can say that "Parse.com is still alive in SaShido.io"!! Good job guys!
emoof 10y ago
I've had very good luck with Sashido.io as a replacement. I ported two of my apps over - migration was easy and very smooth + support and responsiveness were outstanding.
cridenour 10y ago
Why do I feel like this post is getting brigaded by Sashido?
- sashidoio 10y ago
  Because I think that people like SashiDo.io :)
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    This looks really bad for your business.
- iammiles 10y ago
  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.
- kin 10y ago
  I was about to say the same thing. At this point I can't tell who is genuinely recommending me a service and who is shameless plugging.
Swipes_Team 10y ago
We loved Parse! It all started out for them with this community. Sad to see them shut down. We moved away a week ago. Of course, last moment. We have a huge user base and managed to transition what we thought would be a nightmare process, to Sashido. I saw a few others mention them as well. Their team helped us tons in doing the switch. Probably, we sent 50 emails back & forth on details. Don't know how these guys didn't hate us! Super responsive and caring team! Big kudos to them. They saved our butts.
realPubkey 10y ago
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/
- pivanov 10y ago
  Don't forget that there are few more :) like https://www.sashido.io https://www.sashido.io
- ahelwer 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
  - zubairq 10y ago
    Why do you descibe gunDB as SnakeOil? it is a perfectly good product
- HodGreeley 10y ago
  Not understanding the idea here. PouchDB isn't a BaaS. RxDB is a wrapper for PouchDB, correct? PouchDB is a great project, so not criticizing, just not sure what criteria you're using. Couchbase fits the bill as well, and has serious real-world deployments. https://developer.couchbase.com/mobile https://developer.couchbase.com/mobile (Yes, I work for them.)
pivanov 10y ago
Check this out too: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sashido-io https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sashido-io
- sctb 10y ago
  Please stop this kind of promotional posting here. Hacker News is a community, and organized behavior like this is a serious abuse of it. We've banned the accounts that were created to do this, and we'll have to ban the established participants if this doesn't stop.
halldorg 10y ago
I have been using Parse.com for over 3 years for various applications in production and prototype environments. When Parse.com announced it's shutdown I started looking for alternatives but found nothing that could match Parse's simplicity and features. So I decided to stay with Parse and finally stumbled upon SashiDo.io which made the migration seamless and painless - highly recommended. Halldor Gislason AGR Dynamics
halldorg 10y ago
Having used Parse.com for a number of years in production it was a bit of a shock when they announced their shutdown. My search for alternatives proved fruitless - there is really nothing that matched the simplicity and power of the light Parse sdk. After trying a number of solutions I stumbled upon SashiDo.io which has proven to be extremely an excellent choice. The migration has been painless and everything works as well as before or better. Having full alternative access to the databases is a good bonus as is their excellent service. Halldor Gislason AGR Dynamics
gitteraz 10y ago
:DDDDDD all for the happy moments Parse geve i and my team. We like focusing on building amazing apps so hosting our own Parse Server wasn't an option. After trying 2 service providers an patiently waiting for the easiest yet consistent with Parse Philosophy solution... Outta notting came Sashido.io :DDDDDD these now are for the happy moments Sashido is giving me. They are professional, nice support, easy to get along with. The technical aspects ill share in a proper blog post. Thank you Parse, always
jTanG27 10y ago
I switched to SashiDo - Great replacement and staff are really friendly!
rvitorper 10y ago
I liked the graceful shutdown that Parse had. Always thought that FB would just unplug the wire
alysson_b4a 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Thanks for the shoutout, but I'm not part of the parse team :)
  - alysson_b4a 10y ago
    Yes, you are! Parse Server Team :)
- HectorRamos 10y ago
  Thanks for the shout out!
dmode 10y ago
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 ?
- luckystartup 10y ago
  Parse is now completely open source: https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server Your app can also be migrated to a free alternative hosting provider with a single click: http://back4app.com/ http://back4app.com/
- jamroom 10y ago
  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!
odihsas 10y ago
I've been very pleased with SashiDo!
fizixer 10y ago
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).
kiba 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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.
flovilmart 10y ago
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.
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uxonith13 10y ago
I have ran several products on Parse over the last couple years. Loved it and was willing to pay. If you have all your data you can easily spin up a clone on Sashido.io and use them (they host the open source Parse for you and handle scaling and everything). I've migrated a few apps and other than some Parse SDK version upgrade compatibility issues, Sashido has been amazing. One complaint about Parse was customer support, Sashido has gone above and beyond in multiple instances already when it comes to response time AND knowledge. Highly recommended!
hernanmn 10y ago
Hi guys Since Parse announce that the will be offline, we found a very good alternative SashiDo, they provide a very good and proactive service, absolutely recommended. Hernan Mejia CEO SECUOIAIT
lmick002 10y ago
Sad news. It was a great BAAS. My company has migrated our app over to sashido. Their services are pretty solid with a good support team. Larry Mickie. MusicLinx founder
telecuda 10y ago
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.
hernanmn 10y ago
Since Parse announced the final of service as itselve, we were finding an option as easy as Parse is, so we found SashiDo, great solution our apps are on track again. They give us a great and proactive service. Hernan Mejia SECUOIA CEO
Asmod4n 10y ago
By looking at their websites i have no idea what their product is about.
emresancaktar 10y ago
Parse.com is the best BaaS option I have ever used. Now Sashido took the best BaaS options flag from Parse.com. I am very happy to be in SashiDo.io and I really recommend for every developer. Because its same with Parse.com and they improve.
sammcgrail 10y ago
I read this as "Paris is shutting down today" I guess my parser is offline too...
desireco42 10y ago
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.
remzox 10y ago
I'm happy using Parse from Sashido. Very good customer service and they have implemented cloudcode & live queries already.
remzox 10y ago
Im happy using Parse from Sashido. Very good customer service and they have implemented cloudcode and live queries already.
rogerthis 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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).
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throwaw181ay 10y ago
So we know there is a Go version somewhere I wonder why they didn't opensource this instead of rewriting everything to nodejs...
- bdcravens 10y ago
  Assuming this is true, probably due to the fact that most apps using Parse are already in Javascript.
- gfosco 10y ago
  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.
- HectorRamos 10y ago
  The hosted parse.com service is meant to support hundreds of thousands of apps. It was not really meant to be self-hosted by individual developers serving a couple of applications.
ash7ash 10y ago
Sashido is the best alternative of Parse. Great service and outstanding support.
ash7ash 10y ago
Sashido is the best alternative of parse. Great Service and outstanding support.
ebender001 10y ago
I don't have time to put a lot of energy into maintaining a backend. Parse server was a godsend, and it was so easy to use. Needless to say, I was horrified to learn a year ago of its shut down. Although I could roll my own Parse Server and mongoldb instance, I still did not have the time. I turned to SashiDo.io and its easy, seamless migration. Also, I was glad they were charging me a nominal fee. It shows that there is an income stream and, hopefully, this will mitigate against shut down like Parse.com. The help desk is quite helpful, also.
ebender001 10y ago
I don't have time to put a lot of energy into maintaining a backend. Parse server was a godsend, and it was so easy to use. Needless to say, I was horrified to learn a year ago of its shut down. Although I could roll my own Parse Server and mongoldb instance, I still did not have the time. I turned to SashiDo.io and its easy, seamless migration. Also, I was glad they were charging me a nominal fee. It shows that there is an income stream and, hopefully, this will mitigate against shut down like Parse.com. The help desk is quite helpful, also.
nodamage 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Yes
  - nodamage 10y ago
    Well, that's quite unfortunate for the millions(?) of users whose apps will break today for reasons they won't understand.
LordHumungous 10y ago
At my last job one of my biggest projects was a migration off of parse to a postgres backend. Fun times.
fbreduc 10y ago
mongo, node a ton of javascript from a failed startup that i've never heard of, goody!
altitudinous 10y ago
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!
DivineTraube 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    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.
martco 10y ago
Does anyone know if the same admin UI (tables, settings) is available with Parse Server?
- tbrock 10y ago
  It is, it's called parse-dashboard and it's open source as well.
r0y3 10y ago
Hope facebook will opensource the original Parse platform. Less likely, but just hoping.
khalideo 10y ago
I thought it was devestating at first but I found solace when they went open source. But after stumbling across sashido.io i don't even miss parse.com sashido has the Same service but with better features although they still did not add the export feature to CSV. Which is really useful
khalideo 10y ago
I thought it was devestating at first but I found solace when they went open source. But after stumbling across sashido.io i don't even miss parse.com sashido has the Same service but with better features although they still did not add the export feature to CSV. Which is really useful
pixelmonkey 10y ago
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
- deleted 10y ago
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f50 10y ago
This looks like it does similar things that Parse was doing: https://exis.io/ https://exis.io/
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gneil90 10y ago
I have found good alternative: sashido.io with one click migration from my existing parse app. Friendly support, good prices.
aceperry 10y ago
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.
Michie 10y ago
Thank you for your service Parse. I'll me
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shollmann 10y ago
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.
shadesofmike 10y ago
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.
billdhn 10y ago
painless transition from parse.com to sashido.io over the last few months. sashido.io uses the open-source Parse Server.

435 points by jpdlla 10y ago

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 10y ago
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?
- barnaclejive 10y ago
  I have created a few apps using Parse.com, one of them successful enough to take the additional time/cost hit to migrate and host myself using the Parse-Server project. The open source project is great and I appreciate the effort that went into making sure we didn't all get (totally) screwed. Would I use Parse-Server for a new project? Probably not. The state of the BaaS options out there has changed/improved significantly since Parse.com was a thing.
  - jeyoor 10y ago
    Which BaaS options are recommended now?
    - ma2rten 10y ago
      I haven't used it, but firebase is popular.
      - mignev 10y ago
        Yes it's google behind ... but you should rewrite the whole application. That's why I respect Facebook about their decision to opensource the Parse Server. The is the beginning of the Open Backend world. With Parse Open Source everybody will get Personal MBaaS :)
    - primitivesuave 10y ago
      I second the Firebase recommendation. Facebook killed off their BaaS acquisition while Google doubled down on theirs. If you prefer open-source, Horizon (http://horizon.io/ http://horizon.io/) is a great alternative to Firebase but does not have many of the key features like file storage and iOS/Android SDKs.
      - hackerboos 10y ago
        Firebase has a few issues. Take a look at this video and tell me this query and the required data denormalization is acceptable. https://t.co/xd1KUPc8xY https://t.co/xd1KUPc8xY
        bfrog 10y ago
        They must be using something akin to Cassandra to require something like that
        pier25 10y ago
        Yep data modelling and querying capabilities is a real deal breaker in Firebase. Something as simple as filtering by 2 or more values becomes ridiculously tedious. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26700924/query-based-on-multiple-where-clauses-in-firebase http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26700924/query-based-on-m...
        primitivesuave 10y ago
        I completely agree that on its own, the querying functionality can be quite tedious for anything complex. I linked to this solution on the comment above as well: https://github.com/davideast/Querybase https://github.com/davideast/Querybase
        pier25 10y ago
        > Querybase is in an experiment and not for production Also since Firebase doesn't allow more than one filtering field with orderByChild(...) I'm guessing Querybase will do all the work on the client. This is less than ideal since the data has to be downloaded first.
    - harrisreynolds 10y ago
      Backendless is a solid option: https://backendless.com/ https://backendless.com/
      - mignev 10y ago
        With Backendless you should rewrite your apps, which is not so good :) Anyways ... what will happen when Backendless decide to shut down?
        _ao789 10y ago
        Then you too will shutdown xD
    - jordangonen 10y ago
      Scaphold (https://scaphold.io/ https://scaphold.io/) is a super neat BAAS built on GraphQL!
    - george_batski 10y ago
      You should try one of these BaaS Firebase Back4app Backendless
  - Liveanimalcams 10y ago
    but we still got screwed and I still hate facebook because of it.
  - Myztiq 10y ago
    I used to work at Kinvey, they've got a pretty good product geared towards integrating with whatever you've got to connect with. They have always been security conscious, even have HIPAA support now IIRC. Happy to answer any questions, or get some current devs there into the conversation to help out.
- quaz3l 10y ago
  I used it for a new project I started 6 months ago. We've since transferred to AWS and a Express/Node.js project. However the Parse Server open source project is very well maintained and supported. I would recommend it for any quick prototype project you need a backend, but don't need it to do anything fancy.
- gfosco 10y ago
  I think it depends on your level of expertise and the requirements of your project. Having Parse Server as something you can set up in a few minutes on a VPS and start building a client-server app is great. The integration via the various SDKs is incredible, and it takes a long time to build something like that out. All the available options have their tradeoffs, but I think having the source and an interested community is a great pro in the Parse column.
- alysson_b4a 10y ago
  Erik, I recommend use Parse Open source to any kind of App project that needs a robust backend. It is awesome, simple to install and to maintain.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  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.
  - ShaneWilton 10y ago
    > I think the way it's created makes it very, very easy to make bad security choices. I can sympathize with this. I work on a dynamic API security scanner, and the vast majority of the Parse APIs I've scanned have either used API keys with full read/write permissions on the DB, or have left the database in development mode, essentially allowing anyone with an API key to modify the schema of the database. Parse was a very cool product, but most setups I've seen didn't take advantage of the (sometimes hard to find) security features Parse provides.
  - jkestner 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      > 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.
- ojr 10y ago
  for mvp I would say yes, parse-server provides security (ACLs/permissions) and performant database query helpers out of the box, its a battle-tested abstraction layer to mongodb, I had to make some workarounds to work for my specific usecase but just like any other framework it has it pros and cons, marketing and getting new users is the bottleneck for me not the database
SmokyBourbon 10y ago
Missing documentation: what the hell Parse is.
mignev 10y ago
Hi Fosco ... Thanks to you @flovilmart and the other heroes who made this possible :) You guys are aweosme!
marknadal 10y ago
I second the sentiment that Parse has done a good job of shutting the platform down and giving users warning/notice. I hope the Open Source version takes off (looks like it has, with 12K stars!). As a shameless plug though, there are other Open Source alternatives though - we wrote a migration guide for ours: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/Migrating-from-Parse https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/Migrating-from-Parse .
alysson_b4a 10y ago
Awesome Fosco! The open source community has already 12k+ stars on Github and is growing fast. Thank you for all the work and collaboration! You rock guys!!!!
trumbitta2 10y ago
And nowhere in there I was able to find what's Parse and what does the open-source Parse Server do.
- Groxx 10y ago
  Huh. Yeah, I dove around a bit, browsed the wiki, etc, and so far all I've seen is the equivalent of "an open source version of the Parse backend". No description anywhere that I can see about what it does or why you should care (unless you're already on Parse, of course). IIRC the Parse homepage used to have this, but ever since the shutdown notice (so, for the past year) the homepage has largely been useless.
  - taneq 10y ago
    So many posts on HN are like this, assuming that every obscure webservice is common knowledge. "Jabberwocky has reached version 1.1! Performance increased by 30%, users must migrate from 1.0 by the 12th. Use Jabberwocky in your business now! New users get a free trial!" OK that's nice but what tf is it and why should I care?
    - mypalmike 10y ago
      Yesterday I built a 100M user social network using Jabberwocky. It took me just 25 minutes, bro, and now I've retired to my own private Caribbean island.
      - jacobush 10y ago
        So it's you on my Caribbean lawn! Now get off it.
- bjacobel 10y ago
  I'd assume the main goal of the open-source Parse Server is to provide some support for previous users of Parse? Who would already know what Parse does. Attracting new users unfamiliar with the technology seems at best secondary ( and possibly, unwelcome) to the Parse Server community now.
franciscop 10y ago
That cannot work at all! See inside /bin/parse-server: require("../lib/cli/parse-server"); The same with the package.json, it points to /lib/index.js. However there is no /lib folder, apparently its name is /src. So there is basically no possible way that is even able to run. How is this possible? Either someone linked /src to /lib (doesn't make sense) or they changed the name of the folder and didn't change anything else.
- bjacobel 10y ago
  Files in src/ are run through Babel and output to lib/ as a prepublish step. The version that you download from NPM contains a lib/ directory. https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server/blob/master/package.json#L71 https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server/blob/master/pa...
  - franciscop 10y ago
    That makes sense, I would have put them in /dist though

mmastrac 10y ago

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 10y ago
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-facebook-parse-85-million-20130425 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/26/business/la-fi-tn-fa...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
dkonofalski 10y ago
Did you vocalize any of these issues anywhere? I have never used Parse but have been looking at the open-source version. What are the many, many glaring bugs and problems you're referring to?
- jcoffland 10y ago
  We would all go crazy trying to report all the bugs we found in every piece of software out there these days. When there are too many or something is too difficult to use, you move on. To a large extent, finding bugs is the responsibility of the developers. When users submit bug reports, good ones at least, they should be thanked. My point is, as a developer, you can't blame the users for not reporting bugs.

mcescalante 10y ago

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

valgaze 10y ago
They did some extraordinary work Very interesting interview with Parse founder in its heyday: https://soundcloud.com/heavybit/caveat-founder-ep-1-featuring-ilya-sukhar-fred-stevens-smith https://soundcloud.com/heavybit/caveat-founder-ep-1-featurin... On finding an interesting market @ 13:30: Evidently the Parse folks discovered they were dealing with an agency building an application for the Food Network. The agency needed SLAs/enterprise contracts and Parse found a $$ customer base
lacker 10y ago
Thanks mcescalante, we appreciate the kind words!
jamesjyu 10y ago
Thank you, mcescalante. We did our best to make the transition as smooth as possible.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
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 10y ago
  That would likely be overly onerous...what if they use licensed 3rd party components?

ebbv 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.

dbancajas 10y ago

can someone tldr us on what happened to parse?

alvarosevilla95 10y ago
Facebook bought it.
helloanand 10y ago
facebook shut it down
gamache 10y ago
Founded 2011, sold to Facebook for $85M in 2013, folded by Facebook in 2016 (though the software was released as open source).
- j_s 10y ago
  Technically I believe the software was re-implemented as open source; the initial release didn't measure up compared to what Parse offered but the project has grown since then.
jeron 10y ago
Facebook decided it wasn't worth it to continue maintaining Parse so they shut it down and open sourced all the code. Simple as that.
newsat13 10y ago
I am curious to know why facebook bought it in the first place
- jaypaulynice 10y ago
  Pbly talent grab and also it gave them a view of up and coming apps they could target for acquisition: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-facebook-acquired-parse-for-app-acquisitions-2013-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/why-facebook-acquired-parse-f...

rawrmaan 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
- jkarneges 10y ago
  Well, he said "from a developer's perspective" ...
- evan_ 10y ago
  > Why do you think Parse was a failure in the first place? Because the title of this post is "Parse.com is shutting down today".
  - mofirouz 10y ago
    Shutting down is not the same as failure
    - jerf 10y ago
      But it is a reasonable enough definition of it that we should be able to apply the principle of charity to calling it a failure, no? It is not something anyone would mistake for "success" on its own terms, even if the people involved did OK for themselves.
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        It really depends on the goal. It's a success if the goal was to build something to be IPO'd or acquired for benefit of investors and founders. It was a big success in that regard. It's a failure if the goal was mainly to benefit developers. That wasn't the main goal. Incentives like this are why I don't use VC-funded stuff unless I have a fall-back option. Risks also apply to proprietary software in general but many suppliers are more interested than startups are in sucking money out of you for long-term. Market leaders stick around longer.

helloanand 10y ago

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

helloanand 10y ago

Migrate away from Parse without any downtime - http://www.parsemigrationguide.com/ http://www.parsemigrationguide.com/

samblr 10y ago

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

lacker 10y ago
Ilya's a VC now. http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/09/parse-cofounder-and-y-combinator-partner-ilya-sukhar-joins-matrix-partners/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/09/parse-cofounder-and-y-comb... James and I are still working at Facebook, on other projects.
- samblr 10y ago
  Cool. How big was team when parse was bought by Facebook ?
  - lacker 10y ago
    24 people

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

parseuser 10y ago

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.

jtmarmon 10y ago
uhhh...sorry to say but I don't think you're getting that data out anymore. >When your app is disabled, you will not be able to access the data browser or export any data, and your applications will no longer be able to access the Parse API.
- parseuser 10y ago
  The apps were not disabled. The export feature hasn't been working because of a bug on their end. It seams like the claim that Parse "firmly believes in data portability" is complete BS.
  - HectorRamos 10y ago
    The data export feature was replaced by the database migration tool we launched on January 28 last year. We highly recommend using the database migration tool as this will ensure that all of your data is copied over and synced to your new database prior to switching traffic over. Tons of apps have migrated in the past year using the db migration tool.
    - parseuser 10y ago
      It's terrible that you aren't allowing data to be exported anymore. You shouldn't need to setup a server and go through the migration process just to get your data out. The prior export feature that allowed data to be exported in JSON format was great, but that was left broken without any explantation.
lacker 10y ago

overcast 10y ago

What an incredible journey!

imns 10y ago

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

giarc 10y ago
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 10y ago
  I've seen a notification like that, but it had to do with an App not being compiled for 64 bit architecture.

bennythenerd 10y ago

Sashido is a solid alternative for a quick and easy implementation for those who need something similar to Parse.com style services

castis 10y ago
Is Sashido using the parse server for their army of HN spam accounts?
- grzm 10y ago
  Please don't call out other HN members as shills or spam accounts. If you suspect that such activity is going on, do contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer. They actively respond to issues like this.
  - castis 10y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you could point me to wherever it says don't ask others about their obvious brigading tactics I'll gladly adjust my tone, thanks.
    - grzm 10y ago
      I'm not sure if it's in the guidelines (and you're right, I don't see it there). I've seen 'dang and 'sctb bring it up multiple times. One such example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242889#13243600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242889#13243600 I'll note that 'dang is also pretty consistent about including the "without evidence" caveat as well, which I admit there does appear to be plenty. That said, contacting the mods (which I already did) is going to be the most effective way of stopping the behavior: they've got more information available and can not only get rid of the comments, but the accounts as well. Comments such as your tend to add to the noise, and unfortunately unlikely to stop the spamming. Don't misunderstand me: I'm frustrated by it as well. Edit to add: 'sctb responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13524377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13524377

squid3 10y ago

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 10y ago
Are you a nodechef cofounder by any chance? I host with nodechef and am happy with them so far.
- squid3 10y ago
  Yes, I am one of the co-founders. Thanks for hosting with us.
mignev 10y ago
There are a lot of comparisons between the Parse Open Source and Parse.com as a service ...
- johns 10y ago
  Hey maybe tone it down with the sock puppet accounts.

bh13731 10y ago

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

ruslan_talpa 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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!
schickling 10y ago
Thanks a lot for the shoutout, bh13731. The sunset of Parse and the rise of GraphQL was indeed one of the reasons for us to start working on Graphcool. We have a lot of customers who migrated from Parse to our platform which was a good usability benchmark for us. In general GraphQL provides many advantages over a traditional REST like API provided by most BaaS. It frees you from the need for proprietary SDKs and reduces vendor lock-in. Here is a quick way how you can get started: https://www.graph.cool/docs/quickstart https://www.graph.cool/docs/quickstart

Mankhool 10y ago

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?

GalyaTitova 10y ago
You can use Parse Server Hosting providers such as sashido.io so you don't have to make many code changes.
- Mankhool 10y ago
  Cool. Thanks! I already let all my data go, but it will be great to get my app going again.
  - bdcravens 10y ago
    Read the rest of this thread before you transfer there; you'll find that all the posts are by new users and were flagged. I won't say it's brigading, but use your own judgement to decide whether this comment was legit.

mignev 10y ago

I think you should try https://www.sashido.io https://www.sashido.io. Please share your feedback afterward.

shamimalpha 10y ago
We migrated to Sashido about a month ago. Migration was pretty painless. There was one brief outage lasting a couple of hours but other than that the experience has been positive. Beats having to rewrite the app or deal with running own Parse instance (at this early stage of our startup).
timanrebel 10y ago
I have been using Sashido for at least 6 months now. In the beginning I started out trying to host my own Parse servers, since I really liked the concept of Parse as Open Source as well. But running it yourself ruined the whole benefit of Parse.com. As a startup it is not my core business to run a mobile backend a first, but to create an awesome user experience in the mobile app. Sashido's pricing model is also clearer than Parse.com's, charging per request instead of request/sec. Yu also HAVE to pay at least $4.95 that makes it less likely for them to shutdown due to lack of revenue. I can really recommend sashabdo! Also if you've not been using Parse.com.
sctb 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13523203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13523203 and marked it off-topic.

hushhash 10y ago

I definitely recommend Sashi.do as a hosting alternative. Migration was a breeze and the product just works seamlessly!! keep doing a great job guys!

csmajorfive 10y ago

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 10y ago
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

deanclatworthy 10y ago

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?

turblety 10y ago
I've definitely noticed of a lot of these companies that shutdown/close their doors, that it takes a long time to understand what they actually did/do. A businesses front page should explain what they do to the lay person. Even if your product is aimed at developers, most of the time it's not them buying, but their managers who will not want to guess what it is the company does. Just 1 paragraph about what you do is all it takes.
- jcoffland 10y ago
  This is so basic. It's amazing how many projects fail to do this. A common one I've noticed is to have a news feed or blog roll right at the top of the front page. It makes lots of sense to everyone involved in the project but none to potential new users.
reilly3000 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

lubolr 10y ago

Yes, it was sad news when they announced it. I have migrated to http://www.sashido.io http://www.sashido.io last months and they are fine. Look it from the brighter perspective it is open source now and this gives much more possibilities :)

jtaguinaga 10y ago

The team at Sashido.io was helpful every step of the way. Any bump in the road I had would be answered right away. Even if that bump was just me being paranoid. Go team Sashido.io!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

noelh-4thdown 10y ago

Migrated ~25 apps in the last 2 weeks to Sashido.io and the customer support was incredibly swift! It's like they are constantly online and were prepared for this heavy shift.

noelh-4thdown 10y ago

Migrated ~25 apps in the last 2 weeks to Sashido.io and the customer support was incredibly swift! It's like they are constantly online and were prepared for this heavy shift.

vonklaus 10y ago

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 10y ago
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".

walterfernandes 10y ago

I'm trying sashido.io and it is the easiest way to migrate Parse projects! I'm really enjoying that!

walterfernandes 10y ago

I'm trying sashido.io and it is the easiest way to migrate Parse projects! I'm really enjoying that!

bikamonki 10y ago

On the shadow of one of the two major BAAS providers shutting down, I still do not understand the hate towards BAAS. There are billions of real life applications out there that could benefit from a BAAS provider that allows developers to put together a production-ready app very fast, reliably and without the need to worry about managing a server. I simply see BAAS as just a higher level of abstraction on top of a VPS/container. I'd like to thank the guys that built Parse.com, it is an awesome product and I hope this shutdown does not move the industry in the opposite direction, BAAS companies should continue to develop and improve their products. I should add that after the shutdown I went shopping around for migration and found Sashido.io to be a good option. Migration was automatic and I just needed to change the API URL of my apps to get them going. Zero downtime.

parseopensource 10y ago

The time has come ... and we think that https://www.sashido.io https://www.sashido.io is the best alternative to Parse.com. Even more they have best support ever! Also they love their customers!

pivanov 10y ago

I personally believe in Open Source, so I think everybody who want to build mobile app with backend today should use Parse Server. It's open source, no shutdown threat and will become a standard. This is in my opinion and that's why we've build www.SashiDo.io

kalat 10y ago
Migrating from Parse to Sashido has been a great experience so far, I haven't had any issue and everyone there is really nice, launching the new version today so we'll see! def recommend em.

vning93 10y ago

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_ 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - vning93 10y ago
    Great point. It is an inevitable concern with any hosted data platform. Though we do try our best to make your data as transparent as possible and are coming up with more and more ways so you can have tons of control over your data.

MaverickAgile 10y ago

We was parse.com lovers for many years and we did a lot of projects.. After January 2016 we turned to firebase as new BaaS but you need to rewrite a lot of code and change the way you catch events and actions. In November 2016 we discovered https://www.sashido.io https://www.sashido.io and we tried all of their services and support. Today we are happy client of SaShido dashboard, we can use all of parse.com github opensource sdk and SaShido is growing on new great options like liveQueries.. So we can say that "Parse.com is still alive in SaShido.io"!! Good job guys!

emoof 10y ago

I've had very good luck with Sashido.io as a replacement. I ported two of my apps over - migration was easy and very smooth + support and responsiveness were outstanding.

cridenour 10y ago

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

sashidoio 10y ago
Because I think that people like SashiDo.io :)
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  This looks really bad for your business.
iammiles 10y ago
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.
kin 10y ago
I was about to say the same thing. At this point I can't tell who is genuinely recommending me a service and who is shameless plugging.

Swipes_Team 10y ago

We loved Parse! It all started out for them with this community. Sad to see them shut down. We moved away a week ago. Of course, last moment. We have a huge user base and managed to transition what we thought would be a nightmare process, to Sashido. I saw a few others mention them as well. Their team helped us tons in doing the switch. Probably, we sent 50 emails back & forth on details. Don't know how these guys didn't hate us! Super responsive and caring team! Big kudos to them. They saved our butts.

realPubkey 10y ago

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/

pivanov 10y ago
Don't forget that there are few more :) like https://www.sashido.io https://www.sashido.io
ahelwer 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
- zubairq 10y ago
  Why do you descibe gunDB as SnakeOil? it is a perfectly good product
HodGreeley 10y ago
Not understanding the idea here. PouchDB isn't a BaaS. RxDB is a wrapper for PouchDB, correct? PouchDB is a great project, so not criticizing, just not sure what criteria you're using. Couchbase fits the bill as well, and has serious real-world deployments. https://developer.couchbase.com/mobile https://developer.couchbase.com/mobile (Yes, I work for them.)

pivanov 10y ago

Check this out too: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sashido-io https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sashido-io

sctb 10y ago
Please stop this kind of promotional posting here. Hacker News is a community, and organized behavior like this is a serious abuse of it. We've banned the accounts that were created to do this, and we'll have to ban the established participants if this doesn't stop.

halldorg 10y ago

I have been using Parse.com for over 3 years for various applications in production and prototype environments. When Parse.com announced it's shutdown I started looking for alternatives but found nothing that could match Parse's simplicity and features. So I decided to stay with Parse and finally stumbled upon SashiDo.io which made the migration seamless and painless - highly recommended. Halldor Gislason AGR Dynamics

halldorg 10y ago

Having used Parse.com for a number of years in production it was a bit of a shock when they announced their shutdown. My search for alternatives proved fruitless - there is really nothing that matched the simplicity and power of the light Parse sdk. After trying a number of solutions I stumbled upon SashiDo.io which has proven to be extremely an excellent choice. The migration has been painless and everything works as well as before or better. Having full alternative access to the databases is a good bonus as is their excellent service. Halldor Gislason AGR Dynamics

gitteraz 10y ago

:DDDDDD all for the happy moments Parse geve i and my team. We like focusing on building amazing apps so hosting our own Parse Server wasn't an option. After trying 2 service providers an patiently waiting for the easiest yet consistent with Parse Philosophy solution... Outta notting came Sashido.io :DDDDDD these now are for the happy moments Sashido is giving me. They are professional, nice support, easy to get along with. The technical aspects ill share in a proper blog post. Thank you Parse, always

jTanG27 10y ago

I switched to SashiDo - Great replacement and staff are really friendly!

rvitorper 10y ago

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

alysson_b4a 10y ago

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 10y ago
Thanks for the shoutout, but I'm not part of the parse team :)
- alysson_b4a 10y ago
  Yes, you are! Parse Server Team :)
HectorRamos 10y ago
Thanks for the shout out!

dmode 10y ago

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 ?

luckystartup 10y ago
Parse is now completely open source: https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server Your app can also be migrated to a free alternative hosting provider with a single click: http://back4app.com/ http://back4app.com/
jamroom 10y ago
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!

odihsas 10y ago

I've been very pleased with SashiDo!

fizixer 10y ago

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).

kiba 10y ago

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 10y ago
> 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.

flovilmart 10y ago

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.

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uxonith13 10y ago

I have ran several products on Parse over the last couple years. Loved it and was willing to pay. If you have all your data you can easily spin up a clone on Sashido.io and use them (they host the open source Parse for you and handle scaling and everything). I've migrated a few apps and other than some Parse SDK version upgrade compatibility issues, Sashido has been amazing. One complaint about Parse was customer support, Sashido has gone above and beyond in multiple instances already when it comes to response time AND knowledge. Highly recommended!

hernanmn 10y ago

Hi guys Since Parse announce that the will be offline, we found a very good alternative SashiDo, they provide a very good and proactive service, absolutely recommended. Hernan Mejia CEO SECUOIAIT

lmick002 10y ago

Sad news. It was a great BAAS. My company has migrated our app over to sashido. Their services are pretty solid with a good support team. Larry Mickie. MusicLinx founder

telecuda 10y ago

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.

hernanmn 10y ago

Since Parse announced the final of service as itselve, we were finding an option as easy as Parse is, so we found SashiDo, great solution our apps are on track again. They give us a great and proactive service. Hernan Mejia SECUOIA CEO

Asmod4n 10y ago

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

emresancaktar 10y ago

Parse.com is the best BaaS option I have ever used. Now Sashido took the best BaaS options flag from Parse.com. I am very happy to be in SashiDo.io and I really recommend for every developer. Because its same with Parse.com and they improve.

sammcgrail 10y ago

I read this as "Paris is shutting down today" I guess my parser is offline too...

desireco42 10y ago

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.

remzox 10y ago

I'm happy using Parse from Sashido. Very good customer service and they have implemented cloudcode & live queries already.

remzox 10y ago

Im happy using Parse from Sashido. Very good customer service and they have implemented cloudcode and live queries already.

rogerthis 10y ago

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 10y ago
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).

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throwaw181ay 10y ago

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

bdcravens 10y ago
Assuming this is true, probably due to the fact that most apps using Parse are already in Javascript.
gfosco 10y ago
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.
HectorRamos 10y ago
The hosted parse.com service is meant to support hundreds of thousands of apps. It was not really meant to be self-hosted by individual developers serving a couple of applications.

ash7ash 10y ago

Sashido is the best alternative of Parse. Great service and outstanding support.

ash7ash 10y ago

Sashido is the best alternative of parse. Great Service and outstanding support.

ebender001 10y ago

I don't have time to put a lot of energy into maintaining a backend. Parse server was a godsend, and it was so easy to use. Needless to say, I was horrified to learn a year ago of its shut down. Although I could roll my own Parse Server and mongoldb instance, I still did not have the time. I turned to SashiDo.io and its easy, seamless migration. Also, I was glad they were charging me a nominal fee. It shows that there is an income stream and, hopefully, this will mitigate against shut down like Parse.com. The help desk is quite helpful, also.

ebender001 10y ago

nodamage 10y ago

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 10y ago
Yes
- nodamage 10y ago
  Well, that's quite unfortunate for the millions(?) of users whose apps will break today for reasons they won't understand.

LordHumungous 10y ago

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

fbreduc 10y ago

mongo, node a ton of javascript from a failed startup that i've never heard of, goody!

altitudinous 10y ago

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!

DivineTraube 10y ago

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 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  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.

martco 10y ago

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

tbrock 10y ago
It is, it's called parse-dashboard and it's open source as well.

r0y3 10y ago

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

khalideo 10y ago

I thought it was devestating at first but I found solace when they went open source. But after stumbling across sashido.io i don't even miss parse.com sashido has the Same service but with better features although they still did not add the export feature to CSV. Which is really useful

khalideo 10y ago

pixelmonkey 10y ago

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

deleted 10y ago
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f50 10y ago

This looks like it does similar things that Parse was doing: https://exis.io/ https://exis.io/

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gneil90 10y ago

I have found good alternative: sashido.io with one click migration from my existing parse app. Friendly support, good prices.

aceperry 10y ago

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.

Michie 10y ago

Thank you for your service Parse. I'll me

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shollmann 10y ago

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.

shadesofmike 10y ago

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.

billdhn 10y ago

painless transition from parse.com to sashido.io over the last few months. sashido.io uses the open-source Parse Server.