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Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

firebase.googleblog.com

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Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#91

Post by manigandham »

mybigsword wrote: post #40
csmajorfive wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's less likely to happen here because Google is investing heavily in building a business around developer services.

I cannot agree with that. Google Cloud services are way too small comparing to AWS or Azure and they don't make a lot of money with it. They can discontinue it easily.

Google Cloud is way more advanced than both AWS and Azure in many ways and just as big in capacity, if not customers yet. Cloud computing will likely be more profitable than ads in the future for them and they announced billions in new investment just a few months ago to build out the platform further.

It's not going anywhere.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#92

Post by dandelany »

mybigsword wrote: post #30
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…

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…

> We spend months to migrate our product to PostgreSQL

Which means you presumably saved months initially by using Azure, and got your product to market sooner. Everyone should be aware of the dangers of lock-in, and should carefully consider the value of it vs. the liability they're taking on. But I wouldn't say never use products like this. The value-add can be significant, even taking into account the fact that you may have to migrate off of it someday.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#93

Post by guelo »

aeosynth wrote: post #47
pritambarhate wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an Open Source version of Firebase which we can use on our own hardware if we wish to? Vendor lock-in is the biggest fear I have with Firebase. Like Facebook (Parse), if Google also decides that Firebase is not profitable and decides to close down, how do we run our applications without rewriting? How do we protect ourselves, if Google decides to increase the price of Firebase 3-4 times in a single day? Even…

Horizon[0] was announced yesterday; it's basically an open-source Firebase built on RethinkDB. [0]: https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon

Horizon is only the "realtime db" portion of Firebase and it's only for Javascript, not Android or iOS. The mobile app realtime network connection tech is especially tricky to get right without draining a user's battery by doing things like constantly polling the backend. I have not seen anything from RethinkDB along those lines.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#94

Post by TeMPOraL »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #51
pritambarhate wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's better to stick with open source stack. This is a hard lesson each person learns on their own.

The difference is actually between a product and a service. A service is something that another party provides, and that may - actually, they most definitely will - at some point stop providing, for various reasons. You want to minimize your dependence on any services - especially ones that are not trivially replaceable or that don't come with contractual agreements to cover your costs in case of the service being shut down.

That's why I hate the whole SaaS idea - it turns products into services; something that should be permanent (as long as you can maintain the hardware it runs) into something that is ephemeral and ever changing. It's great for the service provider, but it totally sucks for the customers. SaaS drives entropy in the computing universe.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#95

Post by timjver »

ianbarber wrote: post #65
timjver wrote: post #44

I love Firebase, but the Swift code in the iOS guide is of really low quality. For example ( https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/ios/save-data#dele... ): if currentData.value != nil, let uid = FIRAuth.auth()?.currentUser?.uid { var post = currentData.value as! [String : AnyObject] var stars : Dictionary stars = post["stars"] as? Dictionary ?? [:] // ... } What this should really be: guard let post = currentData…

Great suggestion! Pull requests welcome as well if you have time: https://github.com/firebase/quickstart-ios/blob/master/datab...

Oh cool, I already sent feedback through the Firebase website but I'll do this as well.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#98

Post by gcatalfamo »

inlined wrote: post #88
gcatalfamo wrote: post #68

Can somebody explain the new Firebase reframing towards GCP? Maybe with another provider analogy? (e.g.,Firebase is to GCP like Parse is(was) to Facebook)

I cover this briefly in my talk today: "Migrate to Firebase" [1]. Google Cloud Platform gives you massively scalable & robust building blocks at the IaaS and PaaS level. You can use these to do just about anything as long as you have the time and expertise. Combining building blocks to follow best practices isn't always trivial, so Firebase offers the next layer higher in the stack. With Firebase you can mix and matc…

This is great! thank you!

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#99

Post by skrebbel »

jwngr wrote: post #80
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 long…

Great! I found the guides but I couldn't find this info in there.

I like the new features and also the new JS API so I think that's plenty of incentive to migrate. Thanks!

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#100

Post by ignoramous »

manigandham wrote: post #91
mybigsword wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot agree with that. Google Cloud services are way too small comparing to AWS or Azure and they don't make a lot of money with it. They can discontinue it easily.

Google Cloud is way more advanced than both AWS and Azure in many ways and just as big in capacity, if not customers yet. Cloud computing will likely be more profitable than ads in the future for them and they announced billions in new investment just a few months ago to build out the platform further. It's not going anywhere.

> Google Cloud is way more advanced than both AWS and Azure in many ways

I see this being thrown around here a lot. Buying into Google's PR is what this is. If you've valid points apart from BigQuery vs RedShift, I'd request you to enumerate them for me.

I have personally interacted with Googlers who lament the fact that 'no one internally bothers using most of GCP' and hence not being able to 'iterate/innovate as fast as AWS' is a key disadvantage despite their 'superior offerings', whatever that means.

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