Today I tried Cloud Code from Parse. They have done a very good job to make it really easy to run applications on the their cloud. All I had to do is…

1. Create a subdomain for the parse application I wanted to use as backend.
   

2. Install their command line tool

    curl -s https://www.parse.com/downloads/cloud_code/installer.sh | sudo /bin/bash
   

3. Create a first app

    parse new
    Would you like to create a new app, or add Cloud Code to an existing app?
    Type "(n)ew" or "(e)xisting": e
    ...
   

   Gotcha: On my first attempt I did not read this correctly and chose (n)ew. This resulted on my code being deployed on a new application, different from the application associated with the subdomain chosen above. A bunch of ‘Internal Server Errors’ later I found the problem.

4. Create a template app using Express js framework

    parse generate
    ...
   

5. Edit the code under cloud/app.js

6. Deploy

    parse deploy
    ...
   

Now you can create your customized APIs with minimal effort.