[MUSIC] So what's the idea behind mobile backend as a service? Now, let's say you want to develop a mobile app, or a web app. What you will end up doing pretty much for any mobile app that you want to develop is you need to get it integrated with some databases. You need to have some backend servers created so that they can receive requests from this mobile app. database says you need to have networking support, so that there is load balancing, and we've talked about load balancing before. You need to have load balancing involved. Many times your mobile app needs to have social network integration, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatnot. You need to have that little icon at the bottom. A lot of times even the user interface is more or less in the same sort of category. I mean, you would develop an app [INAUDIBLE] another app. They're kind of similar. So a lot of these problems have to be solved again and again and again for one app, another app, and so people started to think, why should we reinvent the wheel every time? Yes. A lot of these mobile apps, as I said, they use cloud services for these things, but they still need to use them. So the idea is, what would happen if we put all of these different cloud services that you're using in one shop, one place? And that's the idea behind mobile backend as a service. So the general idea is that you need common services and among different apps whether web apps or mobile apps. And you want to get away from implementing custom apps each time around. The stuff that you want to have in a mobile backend as a service, sort of suit-up apps or suit-up APIs, cloud storage. And in the next week, next module, we will talk about cloud storage in different ways, but a lot of times a developer wants to be at a higher level, doesn't want to deal with the different APIs. They just pick a mobile backend of the service and cloud storage somehow integrated in that. User management, different users want to log in. Again, that's one common use case for a lot of apps, somebody needs to login. Whatever happens if their password is incorrect? What happens if they forgot their password? Some server has to authenticate. So a lot of this instead of you doing that, you just let the framework handle that. Push notifications, apps, and users mobile devices they always have it, so a lot of apps want to send some information to the app through push notifications. Again, that's something that you can put into a suite of software as the case. As I mentioned, integration with some social networks is also under there. So what people try to do is provide all of these in a one-shop model so that you don't need to go, for example, do Dropbox for your cloud storage and say Yahoo OpenID for user management. And then, do senate monitor STK for push notification and then get some Facebook API. So they want to put everything in one place. There's a good number of these mobile back and other service that have started to grow, some of the major ones and these are by no chance a complete list. It's just some of the things that are getting some traction. Appcelerator, AnyPresence, Appery, Built.io, FeedHenry, Kinvey, TruMobi, and even Apple itself has Apple CloudKit which a lot of you, as users should have in family of it whenever you use iCloud is actually reusing this model back into the service sort of idea. And some of you are probably familiar with Apple's version of it as users. Whenever you use iCloud you need to sign into iCloud and then there is stuff this stuff happens. Apple CloudKit provides that sort of a mobile backend as a service to you. Now, a lot of these frameworks have some commonalities but then there's difference in other parts. So some of the commonalities is for example a lot of them use similar components for databases like MongoDB. It's an open source database sort of big data cloudy data base that we will get to talk about this sort of stuff in the next MOOC, our big data MOOC. And a lot of these mobile backend as a service suits use MongoDB to serve for example JSON objects. We talked about rest API. It's a very common in these things to use rest API to make a call to another SDK or another service somewhere running on the cloud and get your results back. A lot of these build on the idea of microservices. We will talk about serverless architecture later on, but the idea is you just have a little snippet of code somewhere. And you don't really even care about what server it's running on. And a lot of these NBAS suites kind of integrate that idea in their design. A lot of these, as I said, are talking about mobile backend stuff, so a lot of DevOps sort of features are already integrated in these suits, and a lot of times, they even help you with the front end design. So they either, for example, give you a library that you can use, or a lot of times, you just write what you want in XML, or maybe JavaScript. And then, go ahead and create the code for Apple iOS, Android, so on and so forth. So these are some of the commonalities, but then there are of course different spectrum of services that some of these provide. So for example, some of them have better enterprise integration with some tools for some of these names that I mentioned for example come from VMware, some come from Intel. So they have different levels of enterprise integration with that suite of tools. And again, there is a kind of wide spectrum of whether they allow you to run on your on premise cloud or private cloud or public cloud, there's a wide set of differences and of course some of them actually have gone so even towards getting certification compliance with certain standards. So for example, you have some of them that comply with HIPAA requirements, which is medical records requirements. PCI, it's the financial industry credit card sort of requirement, and so on and so fort, EU data security standards. Some of these MBaaS go ahead and do that and then it's pretty much guaranteed that okay, I'm going to go ahead and use this MBaaS to develop my app. By default, by standard it comes with HIPAA compliance and how easy that is. So so far in our course we've focused on a little bit lower level of detail than these frameworks. We'll also talk about specific for example. Cloud storage, we talk about Amazon AWS infrastructure as a service, platform as a service. The idea again here is to integrate all of those and give you one shop. And it's a very new development. It's worth definitely looking into if you want to create an app. [MUSIC]
