News

Amazon Courts Parse-Using Mobile Devs with Cloud Services

• By David Ramel
• February 16, 2016

Along with nearly every other mobile back-end vendor on the planet, Amazon is stepping up to the plate to offer its cloud as a replacement for the Parse service being shut down by its acquired owner, Facebook.

When Facebook last month said it would shutter the service on Jan. 28, 2017, the industry exploded with alternative back-end propositions for mobile developers using the popular platform, who now need to change direction.

Mobile Back-end-as-a-Service (MBaaS) solutions provide services such as cloud database storage, push notifications, social networking integration and more. "Although a fairly nascent industry," Wikipedia says, "trends indicate that these services are gaining mainstream traction with enterprise consumers."

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) is putting on a full-court press to court Parse developers, joining everyone from industry powerhouses such as IBM to grass-roots community activists attempting to replicate Parse functionality in an open source Parse Server project.

"In light of the recent announcement that Parse will be winding down, the AWS team has been working to provide developers with some migration paths and some alternative services, as have members of the AWS community," said AWS exec Jeff Barr in a blog post last week.

Barr went on to detail more than a dozen different initiatives from AWS and its ecosystem partners, including posts such as:

• Migrate From Parse Push to Amazon SNS


• How to Set up Parse Server on AWS Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk


• Transition Guide: Parse Analytics to Amazon Mobile Analytics


• Welcome Parse IoT Customers


• How to Migrate an Application from Parse’s Hosted Service


• Exporting Your Data from Parse’s Hosted Service


• Deploying Parse Server on AWS


• Migrate from Parse to MongoDB Cloud Manager and AWS

AWS is apparently putting more resources than any of its competitors into becoming a Parse replacement. "Facebook recently announced that they are shutting down Parse and that users have one year to migrate their apps to alternative infrastructures," one AWS post said. "We are working closely with Parse to provide a migration path. AWS offers a variety of features for building and running mobile apps, including user identity, push notifications, storage, content delivery, app testing and mobile analytics."

Interested mobile developers can learn more about the multi-pronged effort in a March 1 webinar titled Migrating Mobile Apps from Parse to AWS.