Three months ago we announced that Parse would be opening their Cloud Code product so that their customers would be able to deploy their mobile backends to Heroku. This allowed Parse customers to use a full Node.js environment with Cloud Code. With Parse’s recent announcement, we’re taking that one step further, by allowing you to deploy your own Parse API server to Heroku.

What this means for developers is that you will now be able to run all of your Parse services on Heroku, taking advantage of Heroku’s scalable platform as well as Heroku features like Pipelines, Review Apps, and GitHub Sync. Beyond that, because the Parse Server is now open source, you will also be able to extend and...

Most modern mobile apps depend heavily on the app’s back-end. That’s because many of the expectations users have for mobile apps today -- for the application to work regardless of network connectivity, to notify them when relevant content changes, to have integrations with the social networks they use, for appropriate levels of security, and a hundred other things -- are reliant on the app’s back-end services.

The most common pattern for mobile back-ends we see today is for developers to design, build and maintain their back-end architectures on Heroku. This approach is as flexible as it is powerful, but it requires significant engineering effort. A faster alternative would be to use a...