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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

#111

Post by hiphipjorge »

guelo wrote: post #93
aeosynth wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> by doing things like constantly polling the backend

RethinkDB doesn't require polling. It's like their #1 feature and differentiator from other non-sql databases.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#112

Post by fahrradflucht »

I have build apps with firebase in the past and the feature I missed the most was performing scheduled tasks on the database. Now we are getting this BIG app platform update and this feature is still not in there. AWS Lambda with Scheduled Events for a long time to come :sad-panda:

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#113

Post by manigandham »

ignoramous wrote: post #100
manigandham wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

> Buying into Google's PR is what this is

Really? Have you actually used it or done any research?

1. Container Engine = built on kubernetes, faster and easier than the others

2. Compute Engine = VMs start faster, customizable rather than set sizes, live migration when the host has maintenance or starts to fail, NVME SSDs available with 3. Networking = faster and more consistent performance, all the regions are connected which makes cross-regional/global deployments easier and more secure

4. Load balancing = actually routes the traffic automatically to the closest region and spills over based on capacity, not just DNS junk like the rest, no warmup or latency issues

5. CDN interconnects = cheaper bandwidth and lower latency using their partner CDN networks

6. Pub/Sub = great message system that doesnt need shards or anything to deal with for scaling, supports multiple subscribers and acks

7. gcloud = best shell access available to interact with pretty much everything, no keys or passwords to worry about

8. grpc APIs, fast storage/nearline, bigtable/datastore/cloud sql, Vision API, etc

Yes it's still new and there are a few frustrating issues, and AWS and Azure do have lots of products and their own special offerings, but the core Google platform is the amazing at running a bunch of servers/containers for a globally distributed app with high performance. We've tried them all and GCP has been the best so far.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#114

Post by [deleted] »

hiphipjorge wrote: post #111
guelo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> by doing things like constantly polling the backend RethinkDB doesn't require polling. It's like their #1 feature and differentiator from other non-sql databases.

[deleted]

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#115

Post by throwawaykf05 »

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.

Microsoft put billions into Windows Phone and many (including me) think it's superior to iOS and Android, but what's its market share now? What I mean is, even if it is technically better, will Google Cloud get customers? AWS has a huge head start with significant mindshare, and Microsoft has its pre-existing enterprise customers sewed up. With tech funding drying up, where will Google find its customers?

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#116

Post by kuschku »

guelo wrote: post #93
aeosynth wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> is especially tricky to get right without draining a user's battery by doing things like constantly polling the backend

One simple solution is giving each state a defined name, and keeping a socket open from mobile. If the connection is restarted, each side can name their current state, and the delta can also be easily synced.

Later on, changes can be directly transmitted via the socket.

(I am working on something like that currently myself).

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#117

Post by shiny »

atom-morgan wrote: post #77
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?

I worked for a company that relied solely on Firebase for their backend... I ended up writing a lot of Node scripts to munge our Firebase db's data and JSON structure.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#118

Post by ddorian43 »

ignoramous wrote: post #100
manigandham wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

But amazon doesn't use aws too, right ?

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#119

Post by kuschku »

manigandham wrote: post #113
ignoramous wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fa…

> Buying into Google's PR is what this is Really? Have you actually used it or done any research? 1. Container Engine = built on kubernetes, faster and easier than the others 2. Compute Engine = VMs start faster, customizable rather than set sizes, live migration when the host has maintenance or starts to fail, NVME SSDs available with 3. Networking = faster and more consistent performance, all the regions are connec…

And all of it nicely accessible to the US. What a great idea.
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