Facebook Parse now lets you easily deploy mobile apps to Heroku

The Facebook-owned Parse mobile-backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) cloud for hosting mobile apps is announcing today new tools that will make it easier for developers to run apps on the Heroku platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud from within Parse’s tools.

The news is interesting because, for the most part, building apps with Parse has necessarily meant deploying apps to Parse, which runs on top of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. Now Parse is becoming more open when it comes to where people run apps.

“We’ve created a smooth experience for you to run code on either Heroku or the Parse Cloud, and we’re excited about the opportunities this combination has to offer,” Parse engineer Pavan Athivarapu wrote in a blog post on the news.

The integration into Parse’s command line interface is a result of a partnership with Salesforce, which acquired Heroku in 2010, Athivarapu wrote.

Just like Parse, Heroku runs on top of AWS. Still, this is a win for Salesforce because it’s picking up a new on-ramp for mobile app workloads.

Competing MBaaS services, such as Kinvey, provide deployment options across multiple clouds. AWS itself announced a full-fledged MBaaS, AWS Mobile Hub, earlier this month.

A Heroku blog post has more on the new integration.