Firebase expands to become a unified app platform • Hacker News Board

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#71

Post by pritambarhate » Wed, May 18, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

robotnoises wrote: post #53

I don't think it was explicitly mentioned in the keynote, but it looks like they updated pricing: https://firebase.google.com/pricing/ Can't find the old pricing now, but it seems similar, but with less plan types.

Here is one third party link I found which still shows old pricing: https://www.g2crowd.com/products/firebase/pricing

If this link is correct the new plans have a changed a bit, but pricing per GB seems to be more or less the same. A few dollars here and there. But this shows that the plans can and will change.

Smaller services like Compose.io (https://www.compose.io/pricing/) and mLab (https://mlab.com/plans/pricing/) seem to be charging around USD 15-18 per GB of DB for MongoDB. So either Firebase is less resource hungry for Google or Google's scale is allowing them to reap better efficiency or Google is subsidising Firebase and giving it almost at cost.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#72

Post by toddmorey » Wed, May 18, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

mayop100 wrote: post #4

(firebase founder here) I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on over the last 18 months! When I said “big things are coming” in the HN comments back when our acquisition was announced, I was talking about today : ) We’re really excited about these new products. There are some big advances on the development side, with a new storage solution, integrated push messaging, remote config…

Would love, love for Firebase to have a service similar to AWS Lambda to manipulate and transform data without having to maintain persistent servers.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#73

Post by blizkreeg » Wed, May 18, 2016, 7:43 PM UTC

mayop100 wrote: post #63

blizkreeg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually not seeing my current projects at https://console.firebase.google.com/ and I have two (one sandbox, one prod). Is this due to the over-capacity? They're just not listed under "Projects using Firebase".

Can you email me at andrew at firebase dot com and we'll take a look?

just did. please look for an email from vineet at ekcoffee dot com. we literally submitted our new apps for app store review this morning. i'd like to understand better how this impacts us.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#74

Post by joeblau » Wed, May 18, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

I remember walking into Firebase's offices about 4 years ago when it was 4 people on Townsend St in SOMA in a 300 square foot share office space. It's amazing to see how far they've come; Congrats to the whole team.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#75

Post by davidkhess » Wed, May 18, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

The concern I've always had with Firebase is the lack of a business logic layer between clients and the database. This tends to force the business logic into the clients themselves.

Trying to change the schema if you have Firebase clients deployed that can't be instantly upgraded via a browser refresh (i.e. iOS and Android mobile apps) seems an extremely challenging task.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#76

Post by skrebbel » Wed, May 18, 2016, 7:52 PM UTC

As a current Firebase customer, I'm pretty thrilled about all this (especially since I was afraid Google would pull a Facebook here). However, there's quite a bunch of API changes and absolutely no info about how long the old JS library, endpoints, etc etc are to keep working. Should I get stressed out?

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#77

Post by atom-morgan » Wed, May 18, 2016, 7:54 PM UTC

davidkhess wrote: post #75

The concern I've always had with Firebase is the lack of a business logic layer between clients and the database. This tends to force the business logic into the clients themselves. Trying to change the schema if you have Firebase clients deployed that can't be instantly upgraded via a browser refresh (i.e. iOS and Android mobile apps) seems an extremely challenging task.

> Trying to change the schema

That's the biggest question I have after looking over the site. Coming from the Mongo/Mongoose world what happens in this case?

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#78

Post by inlined » Wed, May 18, 2016, 7:57 PM UTC

pritambarhate wrote: post #49

mybigsword wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should never use products like this where you are completely vendor-locked and will be unable to switch easily to another provider. I did this mistake before and we used SQL Azure Federations (cool & cheap autosharding for SQL Server), then Microsoft decided to discontinue it and provide only very expensive up-scale version of SQL Server instead. We spend months to migrate our product to PostgreSQL... and this is…

I did this mistake with Parse. The open source version released doesn't have full features and we have run into a few bugs which created a lot of issues. It's better to stick with open source stack. I like what Amazon is doing with AWS with services like RDS and ElastiCache. If one carefully selects the services on AWS, there is almost zero vendor lock in. Google also had hiked the AppEngine price in Sept. 2011 which…

Check out my upcoming talk "Migrate to Firebase", today at 3. I specifically cover how to use new Firebase features to add all the missing Parse product lines back to ParseServer

Link: https://events.google.com/io2016/schedule?sid=b4641ff7-0bef-...

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#79

Post by siong1987 » Wed, May 18, 2016, 7:57 PM UTC

mayop100 wrote: post #4

(firebase founder here) I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on over the last 18 months! When I said “big things are coming” in the HN comments back when our acquisition was announced, I was talking about today : ) We’re really excited about these new products. There are some big advances on the development side, with a new storage solution, integrated push messaging, remote config…

For Authentication, it will be cool to have something like Twitter Digits(https://get.digits.com/) or Facebook Account Kit(https://developers.facebook.com/docs/accountkit), which is basically SMS authentication without password.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#80

Post by jwngr » Wed, May 18, 2016, 7:59 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #76

As a current Firebase customer, I'm pretty thrilled about all this (especially since I was afraid Google would pull a Facebook here). However, there's quite a bunch of API changes and absolutely no info about how long the old JS library, endpoints, etc etc are to keep working. Should I get stressed out?

(Firebase engineer here)

The old SDKs will continue to work! We worked extremely hard to make sure everything was backwards compatible with them. We most certainly do not want to break any existing customer apps. Check out the migration guides [1] to get your app updated to the new SDKs.

We understand migrating is not easy or always convenient. If you run into issues or something that used to work seems to be no longer work, please let us know. We will be giving you advanced warning if and when things get turned off.

[1] http://firebase.google.com/support/guides