Optimisation Of European Hub-Structure: Fill & Download for Free

DISCLAIMER: Individual experiences in various job 'micro-markets' and companies vary a lot. So this comment may be statistically incorrectWARNING: If you are from a moderately wealthy family and immigrated here when you were just 4 years old, your experience probably is going to be a lot different. A wealthy background can shield you from all sorts of discriminations including the racial ones.CONTEXT: Have robust software product engineering (& entrepreneurial) background, with experiences of working in Couple of US/SV product companies. PR-holder. Living in Sydney for last couple of years.Australia is wonderful country with beautiful beaches, great pub culture, fantastic outback adventure journeys, warm & friendly 'mates', great food diversity & restaurants, tropical weather (Melbourne weather is a bit mercurial :), great transportation (For example, Sydney has four modes of transportations) and road networks etc. I find Sydney as a wonderful city to live in (we'll come to macro-economic aspects of housing affordability in a minute). For people with entrepreneurial & creative bend, Melbourne may be a better option.However, IT culture and recruitments prevailing in Sydney seems a bit depressive. Yes, there are some fantastic companies (Atlassian is a great workplace), but I've seen enough bad ones. Successful immigration to a new country like Australia (esp. if you are married w/o kids) is not just about it's IT-environment. It's a complex interplay of following aspects -1. Local Experience: 'Cultural Fitness' is important for employers, but I think this whole 'Local Experience' thing have been played a bit too much. Without any racial connotation, I've seen this rule being bent often for people with European descent. While attending an interview for SDE position (from a pan-Asia recruitment) in Seattle, Microsoft never stressed on having 'local American experience' as a criteria to see 'cultural fitness'.As a fellow Quora-reader correctly pointed out, there exists an issue about quality of English spoken or practised by Asians. To some degree the complaint is justified. For example, I've observed extremely poor English (both spoken and written) standards while working with an Asian colleague holding Masters in IT from an Australian University. Again this observation mayn't be statistically significant enough to represent the entire Asian population (don't have data to justify). Understandably, Australian universities are under immense "selection pressure" as majority of the talented Asians typically choose US for their higher education due to a multitude of reasons, forcing most of the local Universities to keep the selection bar low enough to remain sustainable. Even then, at the very least, they should raise the minimum requirement (for students) of IELTS to 7. Although this suggestion may have a huge economic impact on Universities (difference between IELTS 6.5 to 7.0 may be few million dollars) and may crush dreams of many Asian students, this will certainly help to ease the communication gap, paving the way for better Cultural Integration.But unlike the innate IQ, English skills can be improved quickly as long as you spend enough time with native english speakers. Unfortunately, due to greater socio-cultural integration issues and subsequent asian-clique-formations, English skills do not improve for many Asians (even after a decade of residency).On the other side, I've worked with a Python (programming language) developer from one of the Eastern European countries. Though an excellent team-member, he didn't possess very good spoken English skills. And without having any "local experience", has been absorbed straight into a technical leadership role demanding expertise in a completely different technical stack.Technical folks (unless it's a client-facing IT consultancy or sales engineering or senior executive leadership role) typically works at back-office. And worldwide, programmers and technical folks are known to be introverts, focusing more on technology as opposed to human interactions. So quality of English doesn't matter too much as long as you communicate well in technical terms (in GitHub/BitBucket comments, algorithms, optimisations etc.) within the team. Interestingly, on average (there are outliers always), I've seen more extroverts dominating the tech-scene here as compared to other tech-hubs across the world. This dominance of extroverts in tech-scene, poor English skills observed among Asians (on average) and cultural stratification perpetuates that "local experience" requirement, perhaps.2. IT Market (Macro Economics): The overall IT market (dominated by service companies, consulting corporations) is shrinking and I know several 'Aussies' who are sailing for greener pastures elsewhere (Singapore, Valley etc.). One of the main reason for this dilapidated condition is lack of start-up funding (esp. in the Angel region of 1-10 million $) and increased tendency of bigger/mature Australian businesses to outsource IT to Asia. As a consequence, job creation (or opportunity creation) has been stalled.3. Work-Life Balance (WLB): With this economics, it's not too difficult to see why many businesses or business units have skewed the 'work-life balance' to the other, more "stressful" end of the spectrum (This again may depend heavily on the specific company or the group you are employed with). If you are into Enterprise Systems (Adobe CQ, BizTalk, Oracle etc.) WLB should be lot better as compared with roles in Application Development (.NET, Ruby Rails). But it's important to remember that too-much-WLB and tendency to "laid back" work culture serves as a fantastic breeding ground for "Mate-o-cracy" (reverse of Meritocracy)4. Recruitment Practices: Barring some exceptional companies & startups, I found the technical recruitment process has a long way to go to catch up US (& even in some cases - Asian [Flipkart, Infosys, Baidu etc.]) standards. Believe it or not, many times recruiters conduct the 'First Round' of technical interviews with an understandably rigid structure. A joke often goes like this -One door never shuts down for an unsuccessful bloke - IT recruitment in Sydney :)Most of the companies will not ask any algorithms/puzzles as part of tech interview, as the popular belief is - "Anyway you are going to develop some Web apps with some stack/framework. Why bother?", as meritocratic practices are often limited to pedantic topics like - TDD patterns, design patterns, OOP etc, number of Github repositories etc. Just because you've spotted a suitable advert in SEEK, it doesn't necessarily mean you will be given an opportunity to appear for the interview, based on merit alone. It's all about the credibility of the channel through which you are approaching to the recruiter who will represent you to the company. Except few companies like Google Australia, recruiters often have deep relationships with your future direct manager or L+2 manager. Some companies have 'preferred' staffing vendors and only way to get a 'call' for an advertised position is to get represented by a recruiter from one of those preferred staffing vendors (ex. Robert Walters). The prevalent practices rest highest faith on the maxim - "It's who you know matters more than what you know". This poses new challenges in the form of "Cultural Integration" (see below - #11) issues.May be a bit sweeping generalisation, in Australia, especially at big corporations, jobs often do not end up at company's public job portal only to be manipulated by a section of managers who have their own 'preferred' recruiters and 'preferred' candidates without actually conducting interviews - pretty horrible recruitment practices. Also racial discrimination is pretty common in recruitment (over the years racism has moved from being explicit to subtle) industry. Checkout - The confessions of a Recruiter MUST READA recruitment agency's definition of screening is.... hit "delete" with Indian / Asian applications. Sad but true!For a more quantitative approach to labour market discrimination -‘After completing TAFE in 2005 I applied for many junior positions where no experience in sales was needed – even though I had worked for two years as a junior sales clerk. I didn’t receive any calls so I decided to legally change my name to Gabriella Hannah. I applied for the same jobs and got a call 30 minutes later.’...To get as many job interviews as an Anglo applicant, an Indigenous person must submit 35% more applications, a Chinese person 68% more, an Italian person 12% more, and a Middle Eastern person 64% more applications (Source).Ref: http://andrewleigh.org//pdf/AuditDiscrimination.pdfBesides racial discrimination, according to interactions with multiple recruiters there exists another perspective which may be a bit uncomfortable to digest. It's about quality of asian students opting to study here. If you are talented enough, on average, it's hard to justify an expensive Australian university degree (There are exceptions as always. ANU, UMELB, USYD ranks pretty high. Sometimes high CoL plays a decisive role) over a quality US one. During the absorption of these students into local workforce, thus, an obviously biased impression gets formed - which in turn feeds into the prevailing racial discrimination issue, making it particularly challenging for other asian (mature-age) immigrants (especially for those having a darker skin and without an Anglo-Saxon-looking name. In fact, have been made specially aware of my darker skin-tone multiple times, since I landed here).5. Minimum Jobless Tenure: Because of the mix of above and other factors, often MJT is random. Expect it to range anywhere from 20 days to a year.6. High Tech Market Maturity: Although 'hard'-engineering is highly paid (at least through the mining-boom days) and respected, software/tech market is yet to reach to a acceptable level of maturity. Without big successes (Atlassian is an exception rather than rule) at home (successes which are also scaled to other parts of the world), software engineering is often viewed as just another commodity expenditure, unlike Sales & Marketing. In fact many multi-national companies (Including Microsoft and others) has only sales & marketing front-end here without any significant software development.7. Attire: This is strange, but attire culturally plays a strong role in schmoozing the recruiter / hiring manager, ultimately getting a job (esp. in big companies), sometimes even in career progression. As long as meritocratic practices are not completely abandoned, this is probably an 'interesting' experience. This poses specific problems for software engineers who usually rests more weight on algorithms, coding, system architecture & performance as opposed to extrinsic attire.8. Business Culture: Business Culture usually represents a microcosm of the society in general and Australia is no exception. Here, it's a deeply class-based, un-meritocratic, discriminatory culture with a gigantic display of Peters Principle, utterly ignoring any modern management practices. Interestingly the prevailing business culture affects not just immigrants (by a greater degree), but pro-innovation local talents as well. Fuelled by mining-boom-driven complacency, singular focus on "leave office by 5" and "how to avoid office work" gestated a toxic work-culture with an alarming level of corporate politics, analysis-paralysis, stupid and convolutional policies, multi-layered decision-making, nepotism and an unfounded fear towards innovation-driven technological disruption. I've heard some corporate folks here literally whingeing - "Evil Google AdWords is killing our 'golden goose' - classified business - where we used to rob our users by charging an exorbitant price. 90s, where are you ?". With total sympathy for workers who have lost their jobs, I rejoiced when many un-innovative and arrogant local businesses (talk to Sydney people about how happy they were when they discovered Uber to dodge highly arrogant and unionized local Taxis) have to give up at the advent of ruthlessly meritocratic American capitalism and entrepreneurship. It will be much more fun when the oligopolistic Australian banking sector have to forgo a substantial part of their lucrative brokerage revenues (brokerage fees are unbelievably expensive here like pretty much everything else) at the face of brilliant execution from Robinhood (Loyal3 on its way as well. Although brokerage arms of big banks are lobbying against Robinhood in order to continue to rob retail Australian investors with insane brokerage charges). Another example of encroachment - Google and Fairfax playing a different tax gameThe paradox is that Fairfax shed so many staff that it found itself sub-letting the entire second floor of its Darling Island headquarters to none other than Google.A leading bank reported following concerning statistics regarding their Directors’ credibility -less than 3 per cent of our directors have a technology background and only 19 per cent have operational experienceSomebody or something has to wake up undeserving Australian corporate leaders (and plutocratic boardroom incumbents) that world has moved on since Office Space and corporations can no longer be run by an elitist group of bankers, lawyers and privileged class (Why Australian workplaces need much better leaders). Innovators, engineers and DO-ers rule now ! It's an age of technological innovation and entrepreneurial thinking (both intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship). Much-touted Australian Work-Life balance has to have its cost, after all. Yet, focus is still on cost-cuts and BAU (Business As Usual) as opposed to new value or business creation.In a risk averse socioeconomic setup, crowded by an army of institutional and individual consultants, it’s not surprising to observe the feeble presence of production or manufacturing segments (As a Blackmore shareholder I was taken aback when some investors toured the Blackmores facility on Sydney’s northern beaches — all they could see was packaging rather than manufacturing. “It’s just a bottling operation,” one investor told The Weekend Australian) of the economy (as the massive economic dependancy to China continues). Interestingly, among these consultants, I’ve observed a strange form of institutional collusion usually seen only at the upper echelons of management or executives. Before immigration to Australia, never heard (never encountered in US directly or through various casual interactions with numerous friends and contacts) of the term - “milking company X together” - a reprehensible practice where a ‘gang’ of consultants all hired as contractors (often high value, 800$-1000$/day) to the company X, intentionally defer a specific project by months in collusion with a management executive, against the interest of the company X. Without a whistleblower this type of corruption is extremely hard to catch and particularly flourishes in a ‘laid-back’ culture where almost everything is contracted out (see. agency problem) without giving much importance to transparent corporate governance, meritocratic recruitment and fair capitalism (and it’s usual motivational bells and whistles like - Employee Stock Options Plan etc.). In fact, based on my subjective observation, ESOP seems like a “mystical” remuneration here unless you belong to the Executive Management or C-suite.9. Housing Price: With Rent-to-Income ratio close to 50%, and Affordability Ratio (median house price divided by median income) close to 12x (unaffordability is defined at 6x), Sydney housing market is in a bubble. When it will burst, no body knows. (Housing 'severely unaffordable' as Sydney price to income ratio worsens) It's difficult to bear CoL expenses with your income alone, unless you have a partner/spouse/wife working. Raising kids is a whole different story altogether. My heart goes to many middle-class Australians who can't afford houses/units of their own, without taking staggering amount of debt for a house that have a high chance of being depreciated, if the bubble finally bursts.Median US house price is almost half of median Australian house ! (even after accounting for currency conversion).At past, many had purchased multiple investment properties with LVR (Loan-to-Value ratio) as high as 90% (and above) before government made a change in regulation. Government deserves accolades for this. Sydney house prices have surged 50 per cent in just three years, sending Australia’s total real estate assets to GDP upwards to 3.8 times. This is higher than experienced at the peak of the Ireland and Japan housing bubbles. Australia now have the highest level of household debt to household disposable income in the world and the country is expected to lose more jobs and opportunities as it prices itself out of the global market. It's too expensive to take risks and too unaffordable to build startups or buy apartments. Big 4 banks of Australia are neck-deep in their exposure to property loans (Australia's banking regulator is worried about the big four's level of exposure to property). Many greedy (and rest of the bystanders are trembling under FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out) investors are still banking on the demand fuelled by steady inflow of international immigrants like you to defer the inevitable - Great Australian Property Crash.Australia needs to diversify its economy, boosting services exports - primarily tourism, education and health - rather than continuing to depend on resources and debt-fuelled property growth10. Career Progression: Compared to US, xenophobia here runs deeper and manifests often in career progression (especially higher management) subverting meritocratic practices. Barack Obama (President of US : 2009-2017), Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google), Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft), Indra Nooyi (CEO of Pepsi), Shantanu Narayen (CEO of Adobe) - all are glorious examples where meritocratic practices has been honoured dismissing any discrimination based on race, look, cast, creed or religion. I will be interested to know how many big Australian corporations or companies have a CEO with an Asian origin (preferably 1G). Overall statistics portrays a dismal picture -Australians of Asian cultural backgrounds account for nearly 10 per cent of the country’s population but they only account for 1.9 per cent of executive managers, 4.15 per cent of directors and 1.3 per cent of federal parliamentarians.Forgot to mention that, for a majority of cases, your previous Asian (technical/IT) experiences and job-seniority will be discounted no matter how relevant or awesome those experiences were. Most probably, you have to literally start from scratch or accept a demotion at the least. One smart way would be to have a - "test the waters before you sail" strategy. Conduct a reconnaissance before leaving that secure job back home.Keeping racial discrimination aside, there is another interesting aspect of career progression - 'Mate-o-cracy' - where meritocratic practices are completely disregarded. Without passing a judgement on their unfathomable diverse skill-sets, I've observed a journalist promoted as Director of Software Engineering, a successful real-estate salesman working in a High Tech Patent Firm sifting through technical RFPs (Request For Proposals) and many such blatant labour market aberrations.11. EducationOne of the obvious ways to rise above discriminations and attain greater social mobility is Education. Australia has some top-class Universities (ANU, UNSW, USYD, UMELB - to name a few) with world-class research facilities and faculties. But the problem is - absorption of these students into the mainstream local industry utilising their massive talent-pool, focusing on innovation and job-creation keeping all sorts of discriminations (which cost a lot of money to the country, BTW) at bay. Over-focus on mining and few other ancillary industries, did not help to flourish other areas of the economy especially the High Tech market. This makes talent absorption difficult (a far-cry from US). In general, based on my observations, historically education had NOT been perceived as important (social aspect of "tall poppy syndrome" is partially responsible for this) by the local industry (ignore super-niche areas like Finance and Medical Research - which are tiny in size) focusing more on work-experience and on-job-learning. Although this seems meritocratic at first glance, because of rampant discriminations and 'Mate-o-cracy' syndrome described earlier, it hinders social mobility. Although some initiatives by government (National Innovation and Science Agenda) are indeed encouraging, social perspective will take longer time to change.12. Cultural IntegrationUnless you love to stick to your own specific Asian community, it will going to be extremely challenging to integrate or "fit in" (An example - Jason Yat-Sen Li: Being Australian is not about the colour of your skin ). Probably it will take an entire generation. Children of 1G immigrants suffer more to "fit in" compared to what I've seen in US. Bullying is like an epidemic here at school level (Schools 'should be ranked on bullying' to prevent mental health problems, psychiatrist says). Of course, like everywhere else, you can teach your kids to be tough on such circumstances. A good portion of those school bullying is racial in nature and let's accept that sustained bullying is pretty bad for kids.It's shocking to discover people, psychologically, still living in the Victorian era basking in the glory of mining boom days, ignoring all sorts of disruption and democratization technology is creating. Irrespective of endless denial (denying racism is a form of racism - which is pretty common here) institutionalized by public media, you will be repeatedly judged according to your British dining etiquettes, your attire, your skin-colour, your name, your origin etc. Australians place high importance on "humour" (which is great), but often the boundary is pushed too far, bordering with the tradition of "British dark humour" and "racist funny jokes".Chronic underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in public media has justified the existence of NITV (Home | National Indigenous Television | Australian TV | NITV). However, this is not unexpected from a country which upheld highly discriminative policies like White Australia policy till 1973. By the enforcement of Racial Discrimination Act 1975, there has been an effort to declare racial discrimination unlawful, but since then it has morphed into a "subtle" form (ex - police treatments, career progression, social interactions, faux interviews, property renting etc.). Hopefully scenario will gradually improve over time. Empirical evidence validates this. Based on my own Data Journalism study (data from: http://data.gov.au/dataset?q=discrimination), here is a heatmap of the trend in racial discriminations complaints as received by Anti-Discrimination Board NSW. Even though things are getting better holistically, much more improvements are needed in the crucial Employment and Good & Services sector.(Please keep in mind that these are just numbers of complaints serious enough to be reported to ADB-NSW, a tiny sample compared to the unreported ones).BTW, Sydney is the most multi-cultural and least racially discriminative city. Melbourne < Brisbane < Perth < Adelaide is my own subjective ordering (ascending) by racial discrimination. In general, smaller population and high crime-rate do correlate with increased racism. http://alltogethernow.org.au/racism/Observed strong Intra-Asian racism especially from my 2G (second generation) or 1G (immigrated at their early childhood with predominantly wealthy parents) Asian brothers and sisters. A little bit of forgiveness, empathy and tolerance can do wonders against all such hypocrisy. Intra-Asian racism is significantly stronger in comparison with US. Because of lack of importance of meritocracy at the foundation of the society, many racially diverse but talented folks regularly gets evicted out of the country perpetuating some kind of ‘Artificial Selection’, strengthening the myth of white supremacism. Akin to the social dynamics of colonial days, you may observe many (more than what I’ve seen in US; it may change now under Trump) situations of unjustified (and downright foolish) ‘worship’ of Caucasians and exploitation of Asian folks by their own elites. This, IMO, stems from the same root issue of lack of collective belief in meritocracy.The funny part is - all these silly discriminations are causing the country a lot of money - the economic impact of this is massive, especially when Australia is standing at the edge of an impending multi-year recession. As Haas Institute has found out -Of course, you can ignore all these with a typical banter. Unfortunately you will be overpowered (depends on your sensitivity OR how much you care about cultural integration beyond Asian cliques), unless you are lucky or retract back to your Asian community. Many asians dodge these discriminations with a combination of - clique-formation, "fair" skin, wealthy background/entrepreneurship and an Anglo-Saxon-looking name. Darker-skinned asians with a non-affluent background (including me) are not so lucky.US has it's own racial discrimination issues, but over the years it has been structurally weakened by a combination of - Civil Rights Movement (1954–68), "economy-of-scale", meritocracy, diverse job opportunities, true free-market capitalism, top-notch universities, vibrant StartUp culture etc.Update:Motivated by Brexit and resurgence of other extreme (far) right-winger parties across Europe, in the aftermath of Trump’s election, right winger parties are gaining traction here as well. So, it remains to be seen how the drama unfolds across the spectrum of world politics. Interestingly people here with strongest denial of racism are turning out to be biggest supporters of Trump. Hypocrisy unveiled ! It’s extremely frustrating to observe that the repackaging of old colonial technique of “Divide & Conquer” is winning.Overall ImpressionThough Australia (executives, entrepreneurs in particular) believes - Asia and an appropriate strategy for Asia is of utmost importance to its future economic growth prospects, there exists various invisible "glass ceilings" & "glass walls" (some of them are insurmountable) thwarting career progressions of Asian people (mostly 1G, less for 2G) residing here. Check this forum thread - http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1936071If Australians, on average, would have embraced meritocracy and capitalism more than racism & socialist-tendencies, the economy could have been much much more prosperous as opposed to the current state of affairs. If you are of European descent, have an Anglo-Saxon name and suffering from winter depression this is a great country to build your career.It may be possible to focus on your hourly pay-rate while ignoring the entire spectrum of socio-cultural issues described above. Personally, I've decided to go back. Thanks to Australia, I've attained a renewed vigour to combat racial discrimination and social inequality back in my home country. Slightly digressing: we all can do better than our hunter-gatherer ancestors by declaring a crusade against racism. This Human Migration map is so unifying and inspiring -Source: The Human Journey: Migration RoutesBottom line: If you have a H1B, go to US. But having travelled to Bangalore & Singapore recently, I believe, as long as you handle the smog and congestion, the best place to be during 2015-2020 would be Asia, especially in Bangalore (lots of startups, lots of opportunities including social entrepreneurship, massive consumer-base hungry for innovative products and solutions, lots of funding from Asian and American Venture Capitalists/HNIs. Please refer to this excellent Quora answer - Siddharth Pathak's answer to What is going to be the next "big thing" in the next 5-10 years? ). West had their time; It's time for the East :) Anyway that's the content for another post.

M’y understanding is that ERG wants:The hardest Brexit possible.Taxes to go down to the point that the UK becomes a total tax haven (it already is, but of course not for the British people, except a few wealthy Tories).Privatisation of NHS and of all public services, whether national or local.Free trade to be totally extended to all financial services offering to the planet the largest opportunity for tax optimisation & financiarisation of business in general. The City of London to become the universal hub for Tax Optimisation. (Tax Optimisation is the set of regulations and structures which make tax evasion and tax fraud entirely obsolete: You don’t pay tax and it’s all legal.)Maximal reduction of regulations related to food, health and environment.Who cares about Scotland, Northern Ireland, etc.? (Except for the few who already do business through the City of London of course.)I believe that their most secret dream is to turn England into a gigantic John Galt’s Gulch as described by Ayn Rand in her novel Atlas Shrugged. Of coure it’s only a dream but let’s keep dreaming about it…

Parse users have only three possible paths to go:Self-Hosting – I do not consider the adequate solution because of the infrastructure deployment hassle. Parse developers don’t know how to do it, don’t want to do it and that’s one of the reasons they were using Parse.Another BaaS – I do not consider the adequate solution because the API structure is different. Therefore, the users will have a learning curve on the new technology and will need to rewrite the front end code.Parse Hosting Providers – This is the best option for Parse users. No tech learning curve and the application front end code can be maintained.Before choosing among the options above the user has to take in consideration the following factors.Cost of Change: You need to look for providers which deliver you a low cost of change. You need to make sure you are not locked forever on the platform and have access / control over the source code. Otherwise, you will have no bargain power with the provider and the cost of going to a competitor will be the total back end development. Can you imagine how high is this cost for a large app? Re writing one more time the entire source code and tables?Recurrent Costs: Compare the costs of each platform on the long run. That means, when you app has thousands of users. Most of the platforms are free of charge for small applications, but the costs grow very fast after a certain usage. Investigate deeply this item because the cost of change will be high.Reliability: If your intention is to scale up you application please look for providers that can show you how they will make sure complex and large apps have adequately performance.Please find below a summary with main Parse migration options:back{4}app: http://www.back4app.com is the hub for backend and APIs. Just focus on creating amazing user experiences and forget about complex infrastructure. You can build and host APIs for web, mobile and IoT apps, working up to 80% faster. back{4}app uses Parse Open Source framework to make it happen. Open source and low cost of change.Accengage - it is the European leader in Push Notification Technology for mobile apps & websites. Available as a SaaS solution, Accengage has an intuitive user interface to set-up, launch, analyse and optimise your CRM Strategy on mobile devices and desktops. Over 300 international customers rely on the Accengage solution to communicate in a targeted, personalized, automated and synchronized way with their app & website users. Key figures: 60 Months of R&D, 500 Million installed apps with the Accengage SDK, 3 Billion push notifications sent per Month. If you would like to learn more about it, don't hesitate to ask for a free live demo.AWS Mobile Hub - this is a direct Parse replacement that recently came out by AWS. Although this is in Beta, AWS is a well respected platform that supports many huge companies like Netflix and Yelp. AWS Mobile Hub – Develop, Test & Launch Mobile AppsBackAnd - a platforms that allows you to create an AngularJS ready backend for your app. Its really good of you are working on AngularJS web apps and your data is stored on Amazon RDS. AngularJS Backend - Back&CloudBoost : CloudBoost offers Storage, Search and Real-time capabilities for your apps. Its perfect for building data-intensive applications and services. You can check CloudBoost at http://cloudboost.ioFirebase - (acquired by Google) Firebase offers a great solution for real time communication and data storage. It's perfect if what you are doing is mainly data & realtime (chat, game, collaboration, etc...) but it's not very flexible for other things (e.g. payment, SMS, push notifications etc...) Build Extraordinary Apps - FirebaseKinvey - an 'Enterprise Parse' of sorts https://kinvey.comRapidAPI - a backend platform that allows for saving data and integrating APIs. It is based on blocks so each basic action is represented by a block. You can combine blocks to create logic. It has a bit of a higher learning curve but it's probably more flexible. https://www.rapidapi.comStamplay: allows yo build backend of apps in your browser without coding using APIs as Lego blocks. It's like if Zapier and Heroku had a child. It brings together built-in features such as User management, social login, cloud data storage, database, automatica API generation, SDKs, cdn backed hosting, and integrations with any 3rd party API. https://stamplay.comOursky Parse Hosting - Provides Parse server migration and hosting service (on provided server and own server)Disclaimer, I'm a http://back4app.com co founder.