News

mLab Woos Parse Mobile Developers with MongoDB-as-a-Service

• By David Ramel
• June 29, 2016

Already benefitting from mobile developers switching to its MongoDB-as-a-Service offering in the wake of the Parse back-end being shut down, mLab is out with a new guide to smooth the transition.

Early this year, Facebook announced it was closing its Parse project, which served as a popular Mobile Back-end-as-a-Service (MBaaS), leaving many developers in a lurch as they sought a replacement before the Jan. 28, 2017, shutdown deadline.

Parse provides cloud back-end functionality such as storing data, social log-ins, push notifications app analytics and more services to work with mobile apps and other kinds of apps.

While some open source efforts were launched to fill the gap soon to be left by Parse, like a Parse Dashboard, several SDKs and others, mLab said it has been the beneficiary of many developers moving off Parse onto its MongoDB service.

In fact, the company claims that its platform was the target of choice of 78 percent of Parse data migrations.

"As part of the approaching shutdown, the Parse team has made it possible to deploy Parse Server, an open source version of the Parse back-end, to any infrastructure that can run Node.js," mLab said in a statement today. "Developers can continue using Parse by self-hosting the Parse Server software and MongoDB, the database technology that powered Parse."

To help with that, mLab has just published a guide titled "Migrating from Parse."

"To help with the transition, Parse has partnered with mLab to allow existing Parse users to seamlessly migrate their database off the Parse platform," the guide states. mLab said the guide teaches developers how to:

• Migrate Parse data onto an mLab-hosted MongoDB database.
• Create a new Parse Server.
• Deploy a Parse Server onto Heroku.
• Connect your client applications to the Parse Server.
• Use Parse Server to store files for their applications.

"We are proud that our fully managed Database-as-a-Service has been the chosen platform for 78 percent of Parse data migrations to date," mLab said in a blog post today. "Parse users still contemplating the move should get started on their migration as soon as possible to ensure all data storage needs are met. In addition, proactive migration off the Parse back-end service to a self-hosted Parse Server will provide time for development teams to learn how to maintain and scale the open-source server."

Parse co-founder James Yu also commented on the new initiative. "mLab's cloud MongoDB platform coupled with its expert support team is a great choice for Parse developers," Yu said. "Their Database-as-a-Service platform is the perfect complement to Parse Server, and allows us to migrate customers off the Parse service knowing that they will be in good hands."