Comment by sapeien | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sapeien | Hacker News Reader

I think the nuances of the offering are not entirely clear from the marketing website, so here's what I've interpreted.

The product itself seems to be a Node.js framework that glues together various modules, including popular ones such as Express, Mongoose, & Socket.io. How they monetize it is via consulting and hosting, which they offer a fixed price for "unlimited" bandwidth and storage (very unclear how they may throttle this). The pricing is also exceptionally poor, a fast HTTP implementation may respond to 250k requests per second vs a month, and 5 GB of storage for $50 a month...

They seem to not have any sort of release strategy and the readme states to clone their repository. It would require pulling from their repo to update it as a dependency. There are also absolutely no tests, so you don't know if the latest commit is working or contains some work in progress or not. The signup process seems to be needlessly difficult, one needs to manually craft an HTTP request to some endpoint with some payload.

The "AI to build exceptional apps" pitch is vague. I can think of some possible cases such as automatic indexing based on querying patterns, but this is just speculative. I wouldn't trust it unless I know what it does.

Disclosure: I'm Nawaz from the CloudBoost team.

- Yes, it does bundle frameworks but more importantly, it bundles databases like Mongo, Elastic, Redis etc. The idea is we completely abstract databases away from you and give you an API which does everything. We handle the rest like data sync between these databases, managing databases, scaling, etc.

- We're on a "Pay as you go pricing". Let me know your thoughts on this.

- I completely agree, we dont have a release strategy and we need to work on it. You'll see GitHub releases every week within few weeks from now. Thank you for the feedback.

- We have a Docker implementation which will make your sign up process easier. Please check : https://github.com/cloudboost/docker

- One of the visions of the product is to learn how your app uses the service and how your app queries the db - and auto optimize data between databases, so you never have to think about storing your data in different types of databases ever again.

On the last point--I think trying to do this is one of the big reasons Parse failed. Auto optimizing DBs is an incredibly complex and delicate task.

My Parse app's write performance suffered because my biggest table (27m rows, 10 small columns, 15GB) ended up with 17 auto-created indexes, taking up an additional 15GB of space.

Disclosure: I worked on Parse.

I personally wouldn't call Parse a "failure" and without going into details, this has absolutely nothing to do with why Parse shutdown.

That said the real challenge, that other such platforms might not have, was handling all the very different DB workloads for all the apps we were hosting.

I worked on some of the pieces of that auto indexer. In most cases, this is a feature that was both necessary for us and extremely useful for our customers who didn't know how to manage their own DB. What was arguably missing was a way to expose the indexing operations to the developers, although this would have brought it's share of other challenges for obvious reasons.

If we created 17 indexes on the same collection (in some cases, it was way! more), that's because there were query families issued that needed those 17 indexes. I can't say this is your case, but in almost all instances I've seen, this was a result of poorly designed DB schemas and query patterns. Of course, for developers who know what they're doing, it's hard to design properly when you're dealing with a blackbox.

Yes, amplification and DB size are an issue when over indexing but our auto indexer was under constant tweaking and wasn't creating indexes "just because".

It remains a very hard problem...

I completely agree. :)

> There are also absolutely no tests

Could you address this? I rarely trust anything in active development without any test coverage. So maybe I'm missing it somewhere?

I'm sorry, I forgot to address that. Yes, tests are actually here : https://github.com/cloudboost/javascriptsdk

I know that's stupid. We'll move it to the parent repo.

Let me know if this helps.

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