ASX-listed IoT company, Buddy Platform (ASX: BUD) has launched as a public beta, its version of Parse, a mobile application backend-as-a-service. Buddy Parse is a hosted version of Parse that Buddy says it believes to be “the closest possible Parse implementation to the Facebook-hosted original.”
Parse was developed by the company of the same in 2011 and was spectacularly successful. According to Wikipedia, “On November 9, 2011, Parse raised $US5.5 million in venture capital funding. In 2012, its tools were being used by 20,000 mobile developers and that number was growing at 40 percent monthly. On Sept 11, 2012, it added the ability to create custom code on the back end. In 2014, Parse was reported to power 500,000 mobile apps.”
The company was acquired by Facebook in 2013 for $US85m and, despite Parse’s popularity, Facebook announced in January 2016 that it would close down Parse in January 2017. However, it opened the application source code to allow users to perform the migration and released Parse Server enabling Parse applications to be hosted in the cloud.
Buddy announced in April 2016 that was collaborating with Facebook to provide a migration path for customers by deploying a high-volume, high scalability instance of the Parse Server product on the Buddy Platform.
Buddy Parse designed for high transaction volumes
Buddy says developers used Parse to build out their applications because they did not want to take responsibility for building and maintaining their application’s backend infrastructure, and that Facebook’s Parse Server had not been designed to meet the needs of high-volume, globally-deployed mobile applications with millions of users and tens of millions of push notifications sent regularly.
Buddy says its engineering teams led by its Adelaide-based cloud engineering team) have substantially built upon the open source product to offer a level of scalability, stability and functionality not found in any other hosted Parse Server offering.
Habib Heydarian, vice president of product & engineering at Buddy, said: “With this release, we’re making available a very feature-rich product [and] looking forward to working with application developers to continue rolling out the remaining functionality that will see Buddy Parse achieve full technical parity with Facebook’s Parse product in the coming months.”
Buddy says some features and functionality may not yet be available in the beta version, but it will take care to monitor usage very carefully and work to manage new developer signups and migrations such that volume and usage is scaled up incrementally.
The Buddy Parse server is available at http://parse.buddy.com.