5 Tips for Getting the Most out of Your BaaS

Originally published at www.rga.com on June 18, 2014.

I recently launched an iOS app called 2by2. The app allows users to combine digital artwork to create new “double exposure” art, which users can share or combine again. I decided to use Parse for the backend since it provides time-savers like social login, push notifications and data storage out of the box. The infrastructure handles security and scaling so in theory all I have to worry about is the application. That’s the theory at least. In reality, there are some things a developer needs to think about before adopting a BaaS platform. Here are five items I learned about the hard way:

1. Backups — don’t assume (much less depend on the fact) that because it’s a cloud service they will be able to restore your data immediately. My user database was deleted and it took them more than 48 hours to restore. Patience and calm are the order of the day when catastrophe strikes — don’t do anything that will make reverting to a known good state harder, such as attempting to import partial data, etc.
2. API limits — the free service offered 1 million API calls per month, which initially sounds like a lot. But when your app uses the API for everything from logging in to commenting, you can quickly find yourself digging out the old credit card and paying for a premium plan.
3. 15 sec limit — in Parse, Cloud Code can only run for 15 seconds. This makes sense — your users shouldn’t be waiting longer than that for a response from the server anyway. But if you have long-running queries for things like reporting or administrative tasks you will need to relegate the functionality to a cron job so it can run for up to 15 minutes.
4. Promises — Learn Javascript promises, they will make your life much easier for calling multiple asynchronous calls.
5. Ready for failure — most of the companies providing BaaS are either startups or close to it so they release new features often and at times without enough testing. This can cause your app to unexpectedly fail.For example, when Parse updated their pricing model, it broke the ability to upload images to many of their apps. Keep your eyes open for release notifications and be ready to test core functionality quickly.

One last bit of advice — since Parse runs on top of AWS, your app will be affected by any AWS outages. Just one more thing to keep an eye on.

Choosing the right BaaS for your app can mean the difference between success and crash and burn. Choose wisely and write on.