BaaS — Backend as a Service

As usual, in order to bring a website or an app to end users, we need to develop frontend, backend, a server to deploy your code. But with Backend as a Service (BaaS), all you need to do is frontend, the rest will be handled by the service. But before we dive in to BaaS, let’s take a look on other types of service in the world of Cloud Computing.

I. What are IaaS, PaaS, SaaS ?

These are very popular services in Cloud Computing and i bet you heard about these at least once in your life :) The first letter stands for the service that you get, which is infrastructure, platform or software.

IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service
PaaS: Platform as a Service
SaaS: Software as a Service

• IaaS : provide infrastructure-related stuffs, like server. Which means, instead of paying lots of money to build your own server, you just need to rent, scale and pay according to your actual usage. IaaS that is worth to mention are Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine (GCE), DigitalOcean, Linode, Rackspace, Cisco Metapod.
• PaaS : provide service to manage servers, storage, and networking while the developers can maintain management of the applications. PaaS that is worth to mention are AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Windows Azure, Heroku, Google App Engine, Apache Stratos, OpenShift.
• SaaS : just a software/application that user can use over the internet without installing. Some SaaS you might know are Zoom, Google Workspace, Dropbox, Salesforce, Cisco WebEx, Concur, GoToMeeting.

II. What is BaaS ?

BaaS, as the name implies, is a third-party service enabling you to create a user-friendly and scalable website or application without fretting about the back-end. Back4App, Parse, and Firebase are a few examples of BaaS.
Src: Radixweb

It’s not wrong to say that when using BaaS, you just need to focus on developing the client side.

Here are common features of a BaaS:

• Scalable database
• Push notifications
• Email verifications
• Social integration
• User authentication
• Logs
• CDN and cache
• Infrastructure
• APIs

IaaS, PaaS, BaaS actually have some similarities, they just add or remove some of each other features.

III. Why use BaaS ?

• Speed up development process.
• Cost saving

If you’re building a demo to get sales leads or a small project with not much complexity, it might suit you best. Although i say this many times, i feel like i need to say it on every tech product. That is, everything has it’s own pros and cons, it’s neccessary to consider your needs, your business, your budget and your time before we decide to use it or not.

By the way, the reason I brought this up is that i want to introduce Supabase (a BaaS) on my next blog, since it has raised good reputation since launched. So, see you next time.