Amazon Cognito
The interesting thing about all these services is that they're trying to abstract away the same types of problems that all developers come across: Identity, connectivity, sync/backup (and to some extent, deployment).A different (and more disruptive?) approach to this would be to put more control of these things into the hands of end-users such that they provide the 'backend' into which you (the developer) load your application. i.e something like the app-store model but it connects to the user's 'personal cloud' (or the desktops of old - if you prefer). Such a system needs to be FOSS at its core but with a way for developers to get paid for providing value to end-users (who themselves get control of their data/networks).Of course, this won't happen overnight, but the alternative is that everyone ends up using proprietary silos, with huge lock-in and innovation suffers as the tech giants get distracted with lawsuits.I'm working with others on the distributed systems infrastructure we need to make this possible [1], so that we can get to a place where everyone can have their own piece of the cloud. In fact, one of the major components of this is Mirage, which has been discussed quite a bit on HN recently [2].[1] http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020125 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8005130 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726748