The ideal candidate will have built a “top 25 app” and want to build a “brand new service from the ground floor”, according to the job post.

It continued:

“In this role, you will be responsible for creating and owning world-class production tablet and web client applications across major platforms including iOS and Android . You must be willing to insist on the highest standards for quality, maintainability, and performance. You will ensure that engineering best practices are followed and that software is designed to be responsive, reliable and maintainable.”

TechCrunch first reported the news Sunday night.

Developers typically access AWS from their PCs, but smartphones and tablets are quickly supplanting laptops and PCs as devices of choice for more workers, so it would make sense for AWS to turn more attention to those form factors.  And, the company added Android and iOS support to the AWS management console so users can keep an eye on their services from their favorite gadget.

Miko Matsumura, SVP of platform marketing for Kii, a Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS) provider, said this post talks about client app development rather than a software development kit so would not be directly competitive with what Kii does. But it is also possible that AWS will build its own MBaaS — something that GigaOM Pro analyst Janakiram MSV posited in a post (subscription required) a few weeks ago. According to MSV:

“AWS has all the required building blocks to expose mobile backend services. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon RDS already form the backbone of many mobile applications today. The AWS SDK for Android and iOS makes it easy for developers to consume these services.”

General purpose Platforms as a Service (PaaSes) neglected this mobile segment — so startups like Kinvey, Parse, Stackmob, and Kii rushed to fill the void. Now,  the bigger PaaS players are adding more mobile capabilities — witness Microsoft’s addition of mobile services to Windows Azure last summer. MBaaS partisans claim it’s too little too late, but others predict a shakeout in this segment.

Sravish Sridhar, CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Kinvey, who looked at the ad, said the fact that AWS is looking for front-end developers is not a huge surprise but added that the GigaOM Pro report about AWS moving into mobile backend services was spot on. “If AWS is looking to launch a Backend as a Service offering, they need seasoned front-end developers because, you need to build world-class client-side libraries to abstract the backend stack.  For mobile developers, the client-side library is the new API,” he noted.

He also said that it’s a no-brainer for Amazon to add more mobile backend services this since he sees mobile “driving the adoption of cloud in the enterprise. It’s likely that AWS has seen this as well and has realized that it needs to improve its mobile cloud offering to get ‘corporate mobile payloads’ (to paraphrase VMware’s term) to run on AWS.”

I will update this story if and when Amazon responds to requests for comment.

This report was updated at 6:13 a.m. PDT Monday morning with comments from MBaaS providers Kii and Kinvey.

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As Firebase Co-Founder James Tamplin described it, the company built a JavaScript-like rules system that assigns every piece of data in Firebase with one or more rules. “Eg. ‘Only let a user use the app if they’re logged in or ‘only allow 5-digit numbers entered in a field,’” Tamplin told me via email.

Aris Samad, CEO of QuickSchools, which built a school management system that enables class scheduling with real-time updates, was thrilled to hear the news. While QuickSchools password-protected its apps, Firebase needed to address security so that more apps could go into production, Samad told me.

In a blog post announcing the API, Firebase said its security model,

“lets you build secure apps where the client talks directly to the database (Firebase). This is a shift from the normal three-tier architecture (client, server & database) and it makes running your own servers optional for many apps which, in turn, removes the application server as a scaling botttleneck.”

Firebase competes with PubNub, Pusher and Realtime.co but in many cases developers who turned to Firebase — count Quickschools’ Samad among them — would otherwise have cobbled together their own real-time backend, a chore they have little stomach for. Nathan Bashaw, who this week helped launch Scratchpad, a real-time HTML CSS editor that helps people write code in one window and see it render in another, said Firebase streamlines that whole process. “It cuts out lots of steps, cutting and pasting, sending snippets to other devs and refreshing everything all along,” he said.

Firebase, which launched its code in April, is a Y Combinator 2011 alum, and has raised $1.4 million from Greylock, NEA, Flybridge and angels including Amr Awadallah, CTO of Cloudera.

The new API will be available Tuesday and if it works as advertised, there will be a lot more Firebase mobile apps in production soon.

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SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin

This is a big deal because most mobile app users expect to communicate via their apps. What’s the good of foursquare if you can’t alert the world that you ousted Joe Schmoe as mayor of your Dunkin Donuts? The new MbaaS integrations are all available now, according to Boulder, Colo.-based SendGrid.

One of the key advantages of SendGrid, developers say, is it lessens their overall reliance on Amazon Web Services for capabilities above and beyond basic compute and storage functionality.

That’s increasingly important for developers who don’t want to be overly reliant on a particular vendor’s cloud.  SendGrid’s biggest rival is Amazon Simple Email Service (SeS) and by using SendGrid developers can distinguish between their infrastructure provider and their mail service provider. “That’s key because it can take you six months to migrate an app off of Amazon if you need to,” said Mark Geene, CEO of Cloud Elements, a Denver area systems integrator specializing in cloud development projects.

SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin says he hears that sort of thing a lot. ”One of the strengths of SendGrid is it’s easy-on, easy-off. We make it very easy contractually and technically to sign up and to leave,” he said.

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The promise of the new SDK is that these developers can now build a secure JavaScript application with a backend without having to provision or write code for servers, said James Yu, founder of San Francisco-based Parse.

‘With Parse, we handle user authentication, data storage to a server, etc. without the developer needing to make anything but a static HTML page. We believe … this is the next inevitable step in application design for mobile web and traditional web apps,” Yu said Tuesday.

The SDK builds atop DocumentCloud’s popular Backbone.js, so those developers who know that will be able to adopt it easily to build HTML5 apps.

Parse — which already offers Android and iOS SDKs — competes with Stackmob but the real competition for the new JavaScript SDK is DIY server programming, Yu said.

“The alternative to our platform is getting your own servers running. Since technology is moving toward the fat client, we can provide a service where developers don’t need to touch a server any more but still add server-side technology.”

“We do a lot of work with game developers and they usually get to the point where they want to do things like add a high score list to their app. And they think that will be easy but it ends up being a lot more work than they thought — it balloons out so that they all of a sudden have to maintain a server,” Yu said.

“The overhead of developing mobile apps that require a shared, persistent backend that also supports communication between app users is really high and can easily add 50 percent to your development time, yet the backend is typically fairly generic in that if it’s written right it can meet the needs of a large percentage apps,” said Peter Eddy, a developer with Gazelle, a Boston-based e-commerce specialist. In an ideal world, he added, these developers would like to concentrate all their effort on the user experience and marketing and leave the generic but complicated backend plumbing to someone else.

With Parse’s new SDK, they still need to do the work, but it looks to be a lot less painful.

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That, Amell, said is going to be HTML5. And with that in mind, StackMob is announcing a hosted HTML5 solution that will make it easier for developers to build HTML5 and hybrid apps that use HTML5 surrounded by a native app wrapper. StackMob will host the apps and connect them to its existing suite of backend services.

The move expands StackMob’s initial offering beyond backend as a service and allows the company to become a more full fledged platform as a service, which Amell said was always the original vision. He said this is the approach to take as the world gets connected, encompassing a wide array of devices.

“People thought of mobile as just phones and tablets but what we’re trying to say is the market is about network connected devices,” Amell said. “It’s hard enough dealing with iOS and android, but when you start getting into thermostats and TVs, it’s going to be impossible. You need a HTML5 solution and custom code.”

Amell said HTML5 provides the flexibility necessary for developers who are able to build more and more apps using the technology. While some games and other high performance apps will still be built in native code, Amell said most apps will eventually be written in HTML5.

StackMob’s expansion also makes sense in light of where the market is going. Appcelerator, which makes tools to help developers build HTML5 and native apps, just bought Cocoafish, a backend service provider and competitor to StackMob. The combination means Appcelerator will be able to offer developer tools on the front end and a host of backend features in the cloud to connect those apps. StackMob is similarly trying to become a much more robust developer resource. And it may have to if Appcelerator developers, who may have used StackMob’s backend services, now choose Cocoafish because it’s integrated into their developer tools.

But overall, it’s another reminder about the growing opportunities with the explosion of connected devices. Cisco said earlier this month that there will be 50 billion web-connected devices in the world by 2020. That’s going to create a lot of business for companies that can help service and connect these new devices.

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A few years ago we would have shaken our heads, wished them good luck, and figured we would probably never see that game released. Today there is a far greater chance that these folks can bring the next MMO to market. What’s changed? The arrival of specialized Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. In a nutshell, a PaaS allows an entrepreneur to focus on building their cloud application, avoiding upfront capital expenses through outsourced management of their IT infrastructure to a third party.

This is a level up from the cloud itself, which provides outsourced compute power in a more raw fashion. PaaS providers offer database as a service (MongoLab, MongoHQ) or runtime environment as a service (Heroku, Nodejitsu, AppFog), for example. A PaaS can also deliver even more advanced capabilities. StackMob, for example, puts in place a suite of PaaS offerings that radically streamline mobile application development, launch and hosting by providing in one integrated package an environment to code up, host, and run in the cloud mobile applications.

What’s more, a PaaS can even be taken to the point where it eliminates almost all technology skill requirements. GameSalad allows designers to quickly design and publish game applications that even include animation purely using visual design tools. Eliminating technological complexity serves to eliminate a critical barrier to innovation and new company foundation. We’ve all met someone who felt they had a great idea for a new application of some sort. “And I’m looking for a developer or a CTO,” is inevitably the next thing out of their mouth after they pitch the idea.

If that same great idea could be built far more easily and quickly with a far smaller tech team and nominal capital expenses, then, logically the cost of bringing that idea to market drops considerably. This is the value of the PaaS. And its not just a value to guys with no tech chops. Someone that is a very solid designer and front-end coder may be highly technical but may not be comfortable at all with designing and managing a NoSQL database.

Even highly skilled developers with both front-end and server-side chops usually turn to network engineers for help with load balancing, DNS and other infrastructure aspects that are critical to ensuring a cloud-based application runs fast and clean on any device anywhere in the world. Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, is fond of explaining that as soon as he got funded, he hired an ex-Googler to completely recode his app to keep it from breaking. If Dennis had been building Foursquare in the present, he could have probably built a more reliable, faster app by leveraging a far more robust PaaS ecosystem to remove many of the software development and infrastructure management requirements that probably caused Foursquare to be so buggy and break all the time in its initial inception.

How many more kids like Dennis are out there with whizbang innovations that could be the next WoW, the next great service for medical records delivery, or the next amazing tool for crowdsourced scientific problem solving? We don’t know but we are a lot more likely to find out in a new era of PaaS-fueled cloud innovation.

Lisa Petrucci is the VP of Global Marketing at Joyent. She started out as a network engineer for Lotus and has held senior sales, marketing and business development roles in enterprise computing companies for the past two decades at companies including IBM and SixApart. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user ansik.

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The combination of the two cloud platforms isn’t surprising considering that some of StackMob’s original seed investors — Harrison Metal and Baseline Ventures — were also funders of Heroku, which was bought by Salesforce . But it also shows that the competition is heating up in the mobile backend space, as StackMob competes with Kinvey, Parse and others, which are trying to be a solution for mobile developers.

By integrating with Heroku, StackMob helps Heroku’s web developers go mobile more easily. StackMob provides simple API creation and management, social integration, messaging and analytics, while allowing mobile developers to work on their front end and creating unique experiences. Developers will be able to write custom code in Ruby on Heroku and tap both platforms through an open-sourced SDK from StackMob.

The combination of StackMob and Heroku also helps support increasingly complex data-driven mobile apps that require code to process data on servers instead of on devices, said StackMob co-founder CEO Ty Amell.

“Our services allow developers to focus on creating differentiating experiences in their apps, while StackMob takes care of the heavy lifting on backend development,” Amell said.  “With the Heroku integration, StackMob now extends our complete backend solution to a new group of developers so they can quickly and easily build incredible mobile apps.”

StackMob is in beta right now, but Heroku developers will get instant access. Most of the tools will be available right away, though social integration and Node.js support will come soon.

The Heroku integration shows StackMob isn’t sitting still as the competition heats up. Parse has raised $1.1 million from Y-Combinator, Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Ron Conway’s SV Angel to tackle this space, while Kinvey announced $2 million in funding from Atlas Ventures. Will StackMob follow in the footsteps of Heroku and get bought, perhaps by Salesforce? With mobile becoming as big as it is, I’m guessing it won’t be long.

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San Francisco-based Stackmob offers mobile developers a back-end cloud platform that allows them to easily build, deploy and manage their applications without having to fuss with many of the infrastructure issues that can plague startups. That means developers can spend less time building out the basic services that most mobile apps have anyway and focus on a differentiated experience. Especially with many startups scrambling to add talent, StackMob allows them to avoid having to hire as big a team.

“We see ourselves as the experienced back end for the masses. Everyone forgets how early we are in mobile. There will be great ideas out there but people don’t know how to implement the back end,” said CEO and co-founder Ty Amell.

StackMob offers things like simple API creation and management, social integration, messaging and analytics. Monetization tools are coming shortly. Startups tie into StackMob’s platform and they don’t have to build those services themselves. They still need to hold on to some back-end programmers, but they don’t need the same number of employees working on infrastructure.

So far, StackMob has been in private beta with about 200 iOS apps on the platform. Amell said the company, which has a wait list of thousands, is preparing to open up later this year when it starts supporting Android. While StackMob builds out most of its services, it will likely need to partner for some things like location. Amell said the company is looking to integrate data from Simple Geo or Location Labs for that.

StackMob has been compared to Heroku, a Ruby on Rails cloud platform that has caught on with web developers. It’s not coincidental. Some of StackMob’s original seed investors — Harrison Metal and Baseline Ventures — were also funders of Heroku, which has been bought by Salesforce. Harrison Metal founder Michael Dearing will be joined on the StackMob board by Dan Scholnick, general partner at Trinity Ventures.

StackMob could be a major success if it follows in the footsteps of Heroku. There’s a lot of opportunity in helping power apps, and there are very few tools like this for mobile developers in particular. By empowering developers, StackMob can help apps go from ideas to real software much faster and can give rise to a lot more start-ups that don’t have enough technical talent but have some interesting takes for their apps. Amell is right, it’s still early in mobile and platforms like StackMob could ensure that the app boom continues to explode well into the future.

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