Parse co-founder Kevin Lacker sent out a final reminder of Parse shutting down at the end of this month. Developers are urged to export any data they would like to save as soon as possible.
As Lacker explained, on January 30, the Parse API will be progressively disabled app by app. From that moment on, any affected app will likely stop working, but most importantly, it will be impossible for anyone to recover any data.
Parse announced it was going to shut down its service in January 2016, almost two years after being acquired by Facebook in April 2013. Parse was keen on providing a clear path forward for developers to move their data out and into a different service, including:
-
a database migration tool that enables exporting Parse data so it can be imported into any MongoDB database and a migration guide
-
an open-source version of the Parse Server, which provides most of the Parse API running on top of Node.js. During the past months, the Parse-server has received contributions by as many as 134 contributors, who authored more than 1,500 commits, and has been forked more than 3,000 times
Following Parse's announcement last year, a number of different providers, including AWS, Rackspace, Heroku, and many more, have published their own migration guides. Additionally, hosting companies such as mLab, ObjectRocket, Buddy, and others, started offering help migrating off Parse.
Parse has not made public any statistics about the number of apps that were successfully migrated nor about how many apps are still actively accessing their servers, so it is pretty hard to assess the impact Parse's shutdown might have. Lacker stated to InfoQ that most migrations are straightforward and consist of following the steps described in Parse migration guide. Still, he writes, there might be cases not covered by the normal documentation. For those cases, Parse has set up a dedicated mailbox for developers to get in touch and to help ensure a straightforward a migration as possible.