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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

Not all mobile backend requirements can be solved with cloud storage of key/value pairs.

This statement is completely correct, which is why Parse is adding so many features besides just key/value storage. You can already store relational data, do geo-searches, user authentication, file storage, push notifications, and lots of other stuff.

See: https://www.parse.com/docs/ios_guide

Our goal is to let you write any application without running your own server. If you think you can't build your application on Parse, drop us a line at feedback@parse.com and we will be glad to either figure out how it can be done, or put it on our todo list.

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These are also great features. But what happens to that customer that one day realizes they need just "one more" feature - and that feature happens to require they start running their own enterprise?

Not trying to be overly critical here, what you've built is very enabling for a lot of app creators. But it seems to me that any really successful client of yours will eventually outgrow your feature set and need to migrate to a custom solution.

At that point I don't know how you hold on to those customers without needing to build something like a Heroku.

I don't know how you hold on to those customers without needing to build something like a Heroku.

This is a good point. One convenient feature of the Parse platform is that it's located on EC2, so developers can run their own servers on Heroku or just EC2 itself with <2ms latency to Parse if they need to run any generic code. So we can let Heroku build Heroku, and just make Parse work really well in conjunction.

I think right now we have reasonable solutions for this. We would like the solutions to be not just reasonable, but amazing. So there are a lot of other ideas we have to make this sort of development easier. We're working on it.

Have you considered making or supporting a slimmed down open source version of Parse? That way developers could self host and extend as necessary. Having the option to self host would probably increase adoption of your core offering.

We're thinking about it. Some components would be easier than others to decouple from our scaling systems, so it's a tricky technical question.

Do you have a "b2b" api so I can host most of the data and services in Parse, then have an external server handle the stuff you can't do? So you call back to my external server when something I'm interested in changes, and my server can push stuff into Parse and to the clients.

We do not have this right now - you have to call the external server directly, and then that external server can call Parse. We do want to make something like this work once we figure out how to do it right.

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