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AWS Aggressively Positions Cloud as Parse Replacement for Mobile Developers

• By David Ramel
• 02/16/2016

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) is all about scale, of course, and the cloud vendor is putting its scaling capabilities into play by aggressively wooing mobile developers who need a new back-end service for their apps now that the popular Parse platform is being shut down by Facebook in less than a year.

Facebook recently announced it would shut down the service on Jan. 28, 2017, and the industry immediately offered myriad alternative Mobile Back-end-as-a-Service (MBaaS) solutions for mobile developers using the popular platform, who now need to change direction.

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."

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.