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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

#101

Post by jstoiko »

pritambarhate wrote: post #32
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…

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…

http://ramses.tech (shameless plug)

It's not exactly the same thing but it achieves the same goal and is opensource.

API services are generated from RAML files (yaml) No code required for simple crud, biz logic can be hooked using http event handlers. Uses Elasticsearch for reads and Mongodb or Postgres for writes. Other DB can be hooked by writing the proper Db engines, it's all documented.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#102

Post by trowawee »

primitivesuave wrote: post #39

Firebase is an incredibly powerful tool, and in a sense is a "democratizing force" in web development. Now anyone can build a complete web application without needing to know anything about setting up servers, content delivery networks, AWS (which is still quite difficult to use), and scaling. I teach kids as young as 10 years old to build iOS apps and websites with Firebase - they can develop locally and push to Fir…

> Perhaps some day we will have to migrate elsewhere, but I find that possibility extremely unlikely because the clear amount of effort it took to create the Google-y version means this is a long-term play.

Hahahahahaha. Aight. Whatever you need to tell yourself. This is even sillier than Parse; FB doesn't have anywhere near the track record of killing projects that Google does.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#103

Post by CobrastanJorji »

dandelany wrote: post #92
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…

> 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…

That MIGHT be true, but it's not apparent from their statement. Just because it costs N to build a product on technology X and costs M to migrate an existing product to technology Y does not mean that it would have cost N + M to implement the product on technology Y in the first place.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#104

Post by robotnoises »

mayop100 wrote: post #66
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.

Yes! We updated our pricing. We have fewer plan types (just 3 now), and now have a pay-as-you-go plan which is designed for maximum flexibility. This pricing is cheaper for almost every developer.

Oh sweet, I just noticed that under the new pricing, the free plan includes a custom domain and ssl cert. This was literally the only reason I updated one of my legacy hobby apps to the old Spark ($5 per month for the uninitiated).

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#105

Post by wolframhempel »

pritambarhate wrote: post #32
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…

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…

https://deepstream.io is an open source server that's basically a self hosted firebase. It supports data-sync, pub/sub and rpcs and can scale horizontally to millions of connections.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#108

Post by marknutter »

mybigsword wrote: post #19

way too risky to use it for startups. Google may discontinue this project at any time and you have to spend months to rewrite everything for another database. IF google open source it and we will be able to install it on premise and patch without Google, that would be ok. So, I would recommend to use PostgreSQL instead.

Way to risky not to use for startups, IMO. What would you prefer, spending half your time doing backend development to get a system that might be 80% as reliable as Firebase on the off chance that your startup will survive long enough for your custom engineered solution to bare fruit, or spending all your time actually building your product and launching quickly so you can determine whether or not your startup is even viable?

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#110

Post by troika »

pritambarhate wrote: post #32
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…

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…

Overview of open source alternatives: https://deepstream.io/blog/realtime-framework-overview/
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