With Facebook announcing that Parse will be shut down next year, the last date being January 17, 2017, app developers are now in a hurry to transfer data as well as their apps to another hosted provider. The hosted provider market is one of the most competitive ones in the tech world.
Providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Salesforce Heruko are some of the leading ones. Amazon Web Services is the leading hosted provider in the field right now and by a very wide margin. They are known for their services at the most affordable rates.
This article will discuss on how services can be transferred from Parse to AWS.
The Top Tips to Help You Migrate
Do not worry if you’re looking for easy Parse migration. Now before you migrate, always do keep in mind that whichever company will be handling your hosting duties needs to have the following:
- iOS and SDKs for Android need to be available.
- The hosting provider needs to be Node.JS friendly.
- It needs to have back up preferably automated.
While one always has the option to create a brand new server based on any of the hosted companies in the market, it needs to know that the investment becomes that much higher. It is a costly proposition and hence following the Parse guided and recommended migration instruction needs to be followed.
Step 1: You have to move your Parse hosted Data or app to a self-hosted database. One can use the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, but Parse recommends MongoDB.
Step 2: You set up a Parse Server locally and that would also mean that your app will now be running locally but will still be connected to the database for transfer of data. In this case, the MongoDB, which Parse had recommended.
Step 3: You migrate the cloud code to the Parse server now. There will be some native Parse modules that will not be available on the Parse server. This might cause some inconvenience to the developers.
Step 4: Now comes the real deployment of the data and the app from the Parse Server to the infrastructure provider, namely AWS.
An email arrives with a link to download the zipped JSON file which contains the data of your app.
Download and save the JSON file for we will be using it next.
You would now need to get the APNS and the GCM credentials.
Once this is done, you would need to create the AWS resources, the first step of which is to create a new Amazon Web Services account.
As this is done, we will now create an AWS Mobile Hub Project and configure the Push Notification features.
This is where your new app is created.
Do remember, after transferring your app and its data from Parse to AWS, there will be a rework of up to 30% on the original code sets.
After the push notification feature has been added and you have enabled it, your project will now have a new topic name.
You would now need to obtain AWS credentials, which are nothing but access key ID and the secret access key. After you have created both the access and the secret access key, import your Parse data.
You need to then ‘Publish’ which is a process whereby a push notification is sent to a device or a group of devices and then you subscribe.
Do keep in mind that there are quite a few functionalities in which the Parse server has no compatibility with the Parse hosted backend. They are Analytics, User Authentication, and Push Notifications. As a developer, know that Parse migration can take some time. And a good mobile app development company can help you with the migration and its different aspects. For instance, if you’re not careful, it might be difficult to migrate the different user details. However, there are quite a few good alternatives to Parse, and the end product can be a good one that you would want.
App developers can switch to other open-source repository and use it to make the transfer of data easier.