Charity Majors, Systems Engineer at Parse, discussed the company’s mobile back-end as a service offering that has recently been acquired by Facebook with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly, live at the MongoDB Days conference in New York City.

Parse is a Mobile Backend-as-a-Service, Majors explained. Parse addresses developers who want to write a mobile app or game and provides an API through which it handles all the back-end work of the development process.

The company was established as the founders “got irritated about having to build the same boilerplate over and over again,” Majors said. When Facebook looks at us, they just see a team that does developer platform and development tools really, really well.”

What makes a good developer?

Asked what she looked for in her team, she stated it was “versatility, people who are excited about tackling problems across the stack,” strong generalists. It is “neat to work on a product that you get attacked about because people love it,” Majors added.

People who are really good at making a great user experiences, flow, and attractive apps for users, do not want to handle the back-end part, such as sharding, or other database issues. “They want to spend time making things beautiful, elegant, usable,” Majors said.

Scaling apps & data

Parse makes it easy to scale for the apps it provides service to. “Clients build an app, go from no traffic at all to being featured in the app store over night.” Parse can easily help scale all that and make sure users are happy as the app is not crashing.

Asked how MongoDB plays into Parse’s activity, Majors said: “We can’t really work with a traditional relational database. We have over 100,000 apps and we need to index them.”  With MongoDB, the app data is stored, and can be used for back-end analytics, aggregation, etc. MongoDB is “probably the only database out there that can let us do what we’ve done in the time frame that we’ve done it,” Majors said. It is a document database, people can put whatever they want in it, there are no file restrictions, it scales horizontally, and the the replica set is very good.

As far as Parse customers go, there are a lot of people who have an idea for an app and want to play with it over the weekend, independent game and app developers, advertising agencies that want to build fun apps that are not long-lived, for events or promotions. The platform is free to use for a number of API requests, so it is very inviting. Also, “it’s so expensive to hire good engineering talent,” Majors said, thus it drives down costs.  Enterprise developers are some of the company’s best customers as “they know how hard this is, and they are grateful they don’t have to do it, or not do all of it.”

Majors’ talk at the event focuses on managing the MongoDB ecosystem, how to automate it, tune for performance, tweaking the infrastructure, as well as exploring fun failure scenarios, and how to recover from them, “how to dig yourself back out without screwing up your data.”