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Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

firebase.googleblog.com

211–214 of 214 posts

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ver…

> Most corporations are still focused on just moving over to IaaS with compliance and security first

Yes but my point is AWS has more mindshare and MS has more leverageable pre-existing business inroads with a huge number of these corporations.

> and Google has done a great job building a solid foundation for this which should pay dividends in the future

That seems rational, but the countless examples of "worse is better" in life indicate that that outcome is far from guaranteed.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firebase is awesome! Realtime has become a great selling point with my clients (and a necessity for things like chat apps). However, after doing over 20 apps with Firebase I've had to combine with other PAAS due to some features missing/lacking: server-side code (event-driven like Parse had or like AWS Lambda) and better/easier search features. In the second case for instance, let's imagine a support app, it makes mo…

Google PM here. You might want to look at Google Cloud's storage offerings (both SQL and non-SQL based), as well as its compute offerings (including Cloud Functions, which is event driven). One note: Cloud Functions was just announced and is still in alpha.

I am aware of the suggested services; however, the ideal would be to have them seamlessly integrated to Firebase.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#213
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can use any Google Cloud product with Firebase so you have access to Cloud Functions. https://cloud.google.com/functions/

The blaze plan does state full google cloud integration. But I dont think google cloud functions can be directly triggered with firebase

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#214
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…

[Architect from Couchbase]

Couchbase Mobile is open-sourced under Apache 2 and has all of the database and sync functionality of Firebase. From a database perspective it is more complete than Firebase. It also has enterprise level security, REST/Stream/Batch APIs, etc. Take a look and see if it meets your needs.

http://www.couchbase.com/mobile

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