Serverless mobile apps

Developer that wanted to get into the mobile applications market sometimes face a difficult problem. For some applications, they not only had to implement a nice IOS or Android program with an eye-catching interface, but they also had to deal with a backend in some cloud provider.

Think about something like Instagram. It has a friendly user interface that shows users' pictures, their friends and likes and so on. But all that data is stored somewhere in a database, probably in a virtual machine that is running in some cloud provider, and they also needed some kind of web servers that exported that data through a REST API (and these also needed to be running in some virtual machines). A wide mix of backend technologies that would need some good DevOps in order to keep everything under control. Add to this some load balancers, messages queues, background jobs and maybe some authentication mechanism, and you will have a rather complex backend for your initially innocent mobile application.

That is the reason why some companies like Instagram moved from their own, custom-built backends to a batteries-included cloud provider like Amazon: photos could be stored in Amazon's CDN, CloudFront, or maybe in S3, REST APIs could be exported with automatically balanced servers running in EC2 instances, background jobs could get tasks from Amazon's SQS, etc... This simplified enormously their architecture by relaying on Amazon's services, so they could focus on the mobile application and some other aspects of their bussiness.

(from here)

But this kind of mobile applications are now going one step further and they are becoming "serverless". Companies like Parse (owned by Facebook) and Firebase (owned by Google) provide everything your mobile application could ever need: databases, recurring tasks, configuration, users management, social stuff, push notifications, analytics and plenty of SDKs for your language of choice...