Before I dive into developing this idea...
Would you use a DBaaS (DB as a service) where all you need to do is make RESTful requests to a service to store/retrieve/search your records. It's very similar to Firestore and AWS AppSync but it will allow you to bring your own JWT provider (Cognito or Auth0 for starters). So the flow would be the following
- You register
- Specify your user directory provider (Auth0 or Amazon Cognito). That will let me programmatically retrieve the JWT keys needed to verify the requests.
- Then within your app you use regular RESTful calls to save with the payload of the data in the body of the request (JSON format).
- On the backend I will store everything in DynamoDB and propagate the data to an ElasticSearch cluster for text-based search capability.
- I will add additional specialized features (API endpoints) such as 'manage friends', 'manage groups', geo-fencing, etc. These will remove much of the plumbing that devs have to do when they create social apps (inviting friends, grouping them in groups, etc)
Thoughts? Criticism? My feelings won't be hurt if you don't like it and give me an idea of why you wouldn't want to use something like that, so please be as critical as you'd like :)
Vladimir
Hey Vladimir! My humble opinion about this:
About the product itself, it sounds like a good idea but like you said, this kind of product is already well baked into the modern platforms like AWS or GCP and I don't think that only having a different auth option will allow you to add enough value. Or maybe do you have a niche of less/non technical people in mind where you could bring a lot in term of usability?
Also by managing users databases (with data potentially crucial for the business), you'll be in one of these area where your perceived reliability will be very important. And it will probably be hard to get companies to put their database between the hands of a single engineer with a brand new product. You could maybe target users wanting to store non business-core data or small companies to whom you could ensure a custom tailored day to day customer experience?
I would be interested in hearing more about your ideas :)
Good points. I'm an SA at AWS so I can definitely architect and develop a resilient and scalable solution but the trust issue will still be there. I see it all the time in the field -- companies go by reliability (or the perception of it) rather than functionality when it comes to most SaaS offerings.
I'm not sure but maybe this effect could be attenuated by starting selling the SaaS together with consulting. People would be less afraid if you were also there to give expertise and integrate the solution at their company.
Maybe?
The idea to start fresh db is not appealing at all, so yes, there's a market there, but when it comes to reliability I think people would look at bigger players first (Amazon, Google).
Another approach is to create a headless CMS like Prismic where there's an UI that helps you to create the data structure you need. That might be a better approach as the giants don't have one (unless that's exactly what Firebase is all about)
Yeah that field is a bit saturated...