Dealing with BaaS providers
Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) providers are great... as long as they stick around.

For iFamilyBank (our virtual banking iOS app for families) we used StackMob to host the backend of the application. A great, free solution that allowed us to focus on application features. However, right before going live, StackMob was acquired by PayPal which promptly decided to shut down the service.

Now what? Well, Facebook owned a BaaS service called Parse. With surprisingly not too much effort, we swapped out StackMob and integrated Parse. This worked great! We were able to keep our costs down and, since it was already tied to Facebook, we thought we had a long term solution.

Not so! After a year or so, Facebook also announced it would shut down their BaaS service. We again had to deal with a service going away. At least Facebook gave reasonable heads up time before the shutdown and potential options.

Sadly, for us, it wasn't worth the investment to refactor iFamilyBank again and we shut down our application.

Moral of the story... be extremely careful when deciding to use a BaaS provider. Build or host your own solution if you can. Or treat the use of a BaaS provider as a temporary solution for speed to market considerations or to prove out a solution.