Kinvey server setup

Question

I am a member of the Kinvey engineering team, and can talk a bit about BaaS in general. While creating your own backend gives you a lot of flexibility and control, it is also a lot of work.

Back-end as a service providers like Kinvey offer a platform to speed up app development and have already done a lot of the work for you. Tasks like managing a database server and a web service front-end, managing the storage and streaming of files, providing a cross-platform push notification, providing a centralized user and authentication store, integration with social networks, buisiness logic and more are easily implemented with SDKs for each platform.

If I were to list the three main advantages of BaaS, they are:

Ease of implementation
Ready-made back-end platform for cross-platform apps
Automatic scalability if your app becomes successful

As far as disadvantages, your backend feature set becomes dependent on the vendor, and you certainly get more flexibility with a custom solution, but that can often be overcome with business logic. In my own (admittedly biased) opinion, the flexibility and cost savings make it worth at least giving BaaS a try seeing if the feature sets meet your specific needs.