Windows Azure Mobile Services: The Hacker Way

Microsoft recently released Azure Mobile Services, which allows your teams to quickly create a data store and a few operations (insert, update, delete, read) to quickly start pushing/pulling data from your mobile clients (iOS, Android, Windows). I call this "back-end as a service" or "BaaS". Furthermore, It is becoming a hot topic for the past few months as Parse is currently tackling the same problem space. It turns out, there are many more companies in the same arena. Also, to point out, the Microsoft team actually built that with NodeJS / SQL Server.

The value in BaaS is in its ability to provide mobile hackers a quick way to prototype (create an MVP) without having to think about the back-end architecture. This is quite powerful because thinking about architecture might put you down a path that slows down your team's momentum. It is definitely needed -- but not for creating an MVP and putting it infront of real customers and then taking in feedback.

Mobile is here -- it is going to stay -- it is now the standard. That said, releasing a BaaS to help accelerate team's TTM (time to market) is making a significant impact on how we (the consumer) can make better decisions on how these apps make our lives easier and how mobile app developers can make mobile user engagement easier.