Updated 2/3/2015 to reflect the publication of MongoDB’s migration guide.

I was sad to hear about Parse shutting down last week.

Parse made a big push towards serverless architectures, which I think is a great goal. Serverless architectures are the ultimate in letting developers focus on making great products for their users and letting other people make the plumbing work.

In the early days of web and mobile application development, backends were a thing that every team had to write themselves from scratch. Over time, common patterns were encapsulated into application frameworks. Parse was a glimpse farther into the future, providing app developers an abstraction for an entire backend.

I’m a fan of this approach. MongoDB’s number one focus has always been on making developers more productive, so they don’t have to work so hard to use their databases. As more and more applications are built using a set of services, the next step will be around making those services composable, their data composable, and making those pieces really easy to build, deploy, and maintain.

I’m also really happy to see the way that Parse is handling their shutdown. They are giving users one year to move off, providing tools to move off, and provided an open-source version of the backend so the migration can be as painless as possible.

MongoDB has published a guide on how to use cloud manager and elastic beanstalk to help those migrating off of Parse. We’ll also offer a consulting package for those who want a bit more customized help.