8 Things to Consider when Selecting a BaaS Provider

Originally published at www.rga.com on July 10, 2013.

Parse visited the R/GA office in March and was bought by Facebook in April. Since then, interest in Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) has continued to increase. BaaS or MBaas (Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service) saves time and money by simplifying the task of selecting, installing, and configuring your stack and making it easier to write, test and securely deploy backend code while monitoring server performance over time.

Today there are more than thirty different products in the BaaS space. Most of them support all the features you would expect, but some of them do it better than others. Some differentiate by supporting features like email and analytics out of the box.

If you’re not ready to trust one of the BaaS upstarts yet, projects like Tailbone adapt Google App Engine, a standard SaaS offering, to work more like a BaaS. Or consider an offering like Cloudant (DBaaS) that provides an API to a CouchDB-like datastore.

With so many choices it can be hard to choose the provider. Here are a few points from my decision matrix:

1. Price — price ranges from free to $1000 per month. Some companies charge per users or APIs calls while others per application.
2. Ease of use — many of the APIs support one-liners to do things like register, sign up, or store data.
3. Mobile support — while most support mobile, some only support web apps with an additional JavaScript library. The good news is that most products that support mobile also support iOS and Android, though only a few support Windows mobile.
4. Social integration — most of them allow you to easily configure your app to use social networks for user authentication.
5. Custom cloud code — allows you to run custom business logic on the hosted server.
6. Import/export capabilities — this is a must have, you want to be able to import data from different environments as well as back up your data or transfer it to another platform.
7. Cloud hosted vs self hosted — some products allow you to download your project and host it in your own servers. Generally node.js is needed for this.
8. Familiarity — as always, if you are introducing a hard dependency on a third party service to your architecture you should take the time to get to know the providers and understand their roadmap.

BaaS is young and evolving quickly. While it may be premature to deploy mission critical apps on a BaaS, it’s a no-brainer for prototypes and simple apps. This allows your team to spend valuable development time building the best user experience.