Facebook today announced that its Parse mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) cloud is shutting down. It will stick around for exactly 365 days and will no longer be available on January 28, 2017.
“We’re proud that we’ve been able to help so many of you build great mobile apps, but we need to focus our resources elsewhere,” Facebook Parse chief technology officer Kevin Lacker wrote in a blog post.
This is a surprising move, given that Facebook has continually updated Parse with features, although it has steadily open-sourced its software development kits (SDKs).
The MBaaS market has gone through consolidation, especially after Facebook bought Parse in 2013. And many of Parse’s team members, including former Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar, have moved on. And unlike Instagram, Facebook never moved the Parse infrastructure onto its own data centers and off of cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS).
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Parse customers include Quip and Orbitz, the New York Times reported today. But Parse has never generated so much revenue that it became meaningful on Facebook’s quarterly earnings statements. Rather, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform have been quick to offer and enhance tools for building and deploying mobile apps.
Facebook is open-sourcing Parse Server and making available a database migration tool to help move apps off of Parse.
