> Urban Airship (now just Airship)
Ironically, Urban Airship (now just Airship) itself is great example of something that people use even though they don't need it - due to hype. You have a mobile app and it needs to send notifications, but you don't have any in-house expertise on mobile notifications. Management says, "ok, let's outsource this to somebody who has some expertise!" They look around and find Urban Airship - the leader in mobile app notification handling!
So you "integrate" with Urban Airship, per management dictates (the same reason you used Hadoop, Cassandra and Kafka). They give you this big complicated presentation but you discover that, in order to use their "service" you have to:
1) instrument your application to send their API a notification every time something happens in your application.
2) set up a workflow in their system that tells them when to tell you that something happened that a notification needs to be sent for
3) instrument your application to read a dataset from them telling you when to send a mobile notification
4) actually send the mobile notification
You realize that they're charging your company a ton of money to do... absolutely nothing. You're still doing everything, responsible for everything, and they're nothing but completely empty overhead. They could have been replaced by a Postgres instance running on a single underpowered EC2 node (and it would be more reliable). But management sees "leader in mobile app notifications" the same as they saw "leader in distributed computing loads" and insisted that you use this thing that exists because it exists.
Ironically, Urban Airship (now just Airship) itself is great example of something that people use even though they don't need it - due to hype. You have a mobile app and it needs to send notifications, but you don't have any in-house expertise on mobile notifications. Management says, "ok, let's outsource this to somebody who has some expertise!" They look around and find Urban Airship - the leader in mobile app notification handling!
So you "integrate" with Urban Airship, per management dictates (the same reason you used Hadoop, Cassandra and Kafka). They give you this big complicated presentation but you discover that, in order to use their "service" you have to:
1) instrument your application to send their API a notification every time something happens in your application.
2) set up a workflow in their system that tells them when to tell you that something happened that a notification needs to be sent for
3) instrument your application to read a dataset from them telling you when to send a mobile notification
4) actually send the mobile notification
You realize that they're charging your company a ton of money to do... absolutely nothing. You're still doing everything, responsible for everything, and they're nothing but completely empty overhead. They could have been replaced by a Postgres instance running on a single underpowered EC2 node (and it would be more reliable). But management sees "leader in mobile app notifications" the same as they saw "leader in distributed computing loads" and insisted that you use this thing that exists because it exists.