Parse shutting down, move your data

Parse shutting down

This week Parse.com, Facebook’s Mobile Backend as a Service offering, surprised their users. The service will shut down next year and all users are asked to move on. The Parse backend server has been released as open source project, a tool has been made available to migrate data. My Bluemix colleagues have created migration guides.

Mike Elsmore has created a quick overview of how to provision the required services on Bluemix to move over your data from Parse.com. Reading his instructions probably requires more time than the actual migration process. If you are not that deep into Bluemix, want more details, or a simple click of a button to deploy the required components, I would recommend reading the extended tutorial that Andrew Trice wrote. He walks you through the process, step by step and screenshot by screenshot, on how to provision and configure the services, how to move the data, and eventually testing the migrated application. 

Parse is using the NoSQL MongoDB to store the data. You can take a look at the DatabaseAdapter.js and ExportAdapter.js files to see how Parse is using the database and, if you like, write your own adapter for Cloudant/CouchDB or maybe even a relational database like MySQL or DB2.

Given that several Cloud service providers and PaaS hosters have announced shutting down, it is an interesting time. It seems that a new chapter in the Cloud story has begun, market consolidation has started.