BaaS and Vendor Lock In

Yesterday, Parse announced that is shutting down. I don’t know Parse closely enough to say if this move is surprising or somehow expected, but I’m sure that there are many developers our there that are very sad today since in less then a year they will have to migrate their apps to a different service or backend. While some years ago everyone was saying that Backends as a Service would be the future of computing and a game changing way to prototype apps, today it’s clear that this is not true. Backends as a Service were far less successful than expected and the facts clearly say that in the era of Cloud Computing it is extremely important to write apps that avoid vendor lock in. This is true today for Parse but the same is valid for all the developers using services on AWS/GCE/Azure. If you are building a business, no matter how small, don’t rely on this solutions, build something that sets you free, avoiding vendor lock in and using opensource technologies.