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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

#171

Post by mbleigh »

hbhakhra wrote: post #170
intellegacy wrote: post #84

Is there a tutorial that explains how to setup a backend for user-taken videos? for an IOS app one thing I liked about Parse was that it's documentation was newbie-friendly.

I've used firebase for other apps but not video storage. From what I've read about how it works, its better to store the media in some 3rd party system such as S3 and keep the link to the file in firebase. Here is one good thread I found with a little searching: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/firebase-angular/xb2be...

Firebase Storage launched today and is perfect for things like storing video! https://firebase.google.com/docs/storage/

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#172

Post by blairanderson »

From my experience with the new API, it's a little less intuitive and worse documentation. I think it's rad that Google invested a ton of resources into firebase.

we have been super successful with firebase, and are proponents of using it as a notification system and less of a datastore. That would be easy, but unwise. Use it to notify clients of changes so they can fetch data. Read from Firebase, write to your own server/DB.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#173

Post by dbb01 »

csears wrote: post #145
TeMPOraL wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I totally respect your perspective, but SaaS is gaining popularity because software customers are making an informed decision about the tradeoffs of product vs service as a delivery model, not because service providers are forcing the SaaS model on them. Many customers see value in shifting the operations and support burden to the software vendor. I think it's ultimately good that users have more choice in how they c…

The key though is that you want to use open source software that some company has provided as a service so you get all the benefits of SaaS without the lockin. Heroku Postgres for example. If Heroku shuts down or is no longer an option, you just spin up with a different PostgreSQL service provider, or run it yourself with no code changes.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#174

Post by guelo »

jkarneges wrote: post #165
guelo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Websockets cannot be as efficient as native network management code.

What does this even mean? WebSockets can be used natively. In fact the Firebase client uses WebSockets, same as Horizon.

Sorry I was confused about terms, what I was thinking of was Javascript vs native. Native code can do more than a browser sandboxed client can.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#175

Post by manigandham »

kuschku wrote: post #168
CydeWeys wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon and Microsoft are both also US-based companies.

And not any better – at least you don’t get vendor lock-in with them.

What are you talking about? VMs are the same across any cloud if you just want IaaS.

They all have their own proprietary services which are valuable but it's completely your choice to use them.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#176

Post by vacri »

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…

From experience, changing databases on a product in flight is not trivial. Even moving our production database from an external vendor to an in-house location (exact same database engine and version) was a decent-size task, and would have been much, much easier with greenfields or a chunk of downtime.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#177

Post by manigandham »

throwawaykf05 wrote: post #115
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.

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?

You're vastly underestimating the computing market. Startups/tech funding are a microscopic part of the industry. There are millions of small businesses and thousands of major corporations that are slowly moving into the cloud which are all new customers for the taking.

AWS has a head start and a great product catalog, Azure has the windows/office/server ecosystem, but Google has been doing scaled computing for a very long time and has contributed to many of the innovations in the industry. Although they're newer with less features, what they do have is more advanced and the Google name carries a lot of weight and reputation.

Most corporations are still focused on just moving over to IaaS with compliance and security first and Google has done a great job building a solid foundation for this which should pay dividends in the future.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#178

Post by joeyspn »

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…

Congrats on the launch. What about hybrid (ionic/cordova/phonegap) apps? Any chance you'll be adding support via an official plugin?

Firebase has been a popular choice for backend, but now there's no clear way (at least as reflected in the current docs) to take advantage of all the offer (FCM, testing, etc).

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#179

Post by kabes »

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…

There's also Meteor

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#180

Post by albeva »

I think services like firebase are a very scary thing. Too much dependence on one vendor, too much black box magic, too much logic that is beyond control. And services like this contribute to general dumbing down of software developers. We're heading towards world of script kiddies where html and js rule and all complex logic is handled and controlled by service providers. Is it a good thing? You can deliver fast, but in the long term is it worth it?
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