Facebook Is Shutting Down Parse, Its Competitor to Amazon Web Services

However, Parse will remain operational until operate until January 28, 2017, to enable developers – who have used the platform for creating almost 600,000 apps – have adequate time to shift their apps over to other platforms.

Listing a number of focus areas for Facebook moving forward, Facebook spokesman Michael Kirkland said in a statement, “Moving forward we want to dedicate more resources to high-impact products and services in areas like analytics, monetization, discovery, and authentication”. Facebook’s decision might not be the best, since the developers will have trust issues in the future when it comes to investing in platforms owned by Facebook.

Facebook is shutting down Parse, its tool for helping developers build mobile apps, as it steps away from the intensely competitive cloud computing space to focus its attention elsewhere. Facebook acquired it in 2013 and it continued to grow both in terms of user base and functionality allowing devs to add a powerful scalable backend to their apps to take care of care of push notifications, connectivity and data storage. Parse will also provide several tools to help migrate applications to other services. When it was bought by Facebook, the platform specialized on mobile developers.

“We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible”, wrote Kevin Lucker, the co-founder.

Developers have a year to get their stuff off of Parse, or else Facebook is offering a few different tools to help developers make sure their apps can keep running after the shutdown. There’s also a full migration guide available that details how to use the open source Parse Server to run most of the Parse API from a custom Node.js server.

The announcement came via a blog post Thursday afternoon, just six months after Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar left the company.

Having Parse’s services in its stable helped give Facebook a foothold in the cloud services space, alongside players like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.