A Little About Platforms: Backend-as-a-Service

    Five years ago, the backend-as-a-service (BaaS) market was fairly small. Today, it is valued at $ 1.32 billion and is expected to grow to 28 billion by 2020. In this article, we will see why BaaS is needed and consider the principles of the BaaS provider with a specific example. / photo CommScope CC Today, using BaaS, developers are able to quickly build the necessary backend and platform for processing data coming from mobile applications. BaaS functions include cloud storage, push notifications, user and file management, location services, etc. All these services have their own API, which allows them to easily integrate into applications.






    In essence, BaaS solves three tasks of developers. The first of these is the speed of development. For each project, it is necessary to determine a key set of product features and the technologies used, with which the project will be implemented. Backend-as-a-Service solves these problems by answering the question: "How to get to the next iteration quickly, cheaply and with minimal risk."

    The second task BaaS solves is uniformity. In this case, multi-platform tasks are shifted from front-end to back-end, which makes it possible to make applications for different operating systems with the same “stuffing under the hood” and not be confused in their features.

    The third is coverage. If your startup is built on a specific idea with high virality, BaaS will help with such things as integration with social networks and cloud storage.

    Real case


    BaaS platforms are used by many developers of games, social and corporate applications. Previously, the flagship of the BaaS movement was Parse. It was founded in 2011 and provided a solution for remote work with data (processing and storage), which simplified the writing of server-side business logic in JS.

    However, in 2016, Facebook bought a startup and stopped customer service after a year. This event coincided in time with the development of the domestic BaaS platform Scorocode from Prof-IT Ventures. The fact that the market needed a new backend solution was supported by the results of the analysis. According to statistics, about two thousand mobile applications appear daily in the world: fresh projects, new ideas are being implemented, the number of developers is increasing by 20-30% every year.

    Scorocode is a cloud-based backend platform that uses the principle of separation by type of clustering - APIs, database management systems, files, statistics - and simplifies the development of mobile, desktop and web applications. Each API cluster working with end applications is able to withstand a load of up to 25 thousand requests per second.



    The Scorocode backend platform works as follows: applications access the DNS round robin, which distributes queries across clusters. Further, the cluster API distributes them to the DBMS, providing a many-to-many relationship. Note that the main DBMS used in Scorocode is MongoDB, and the company also uses Redis, a queue server for RabbitMQ, and a high-performance Go API.

    “Google is actively developing the Go language, writing on it is comfortable, the code is compact, and its performance is kept at C ++,” said Prof-IT Ventures employees. “Multiple platform microservices are also developed on Go.”

    By implementing the Scorocode project, the company wanted to find a reliable hosting provider that could provide fault-tolerance of the cloud platform and secure data storage in Russia.

    “Since it is difficult to immediately evaluate the resources required for operation, the architecture of the solution has been repeatedly adjusted. All this time (about two months), IT-GRAD allowed us to work for free, quickly allocating the necessary power for the project, ” says Ara Israelyan, Director of Software Development at Prof-IT Ventures.

    For the purposes of Prof-IT Ventures, the long-term development of the platform and application support throughout their entire life cycle were listed: this included the rapid development of the backend and prototyping of front-end applications of any scale.

    Today, Scorocode provides a ready-made set of functions from the IT-GRAD cloud that reduce application development time by making it easier for the developer to perform routine tasks, which include things like authorization, password recovery, saving and managing user data, modeling, and implementing notifications (push , email, SMS), as well as clear analytics systems.

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