Live data from Hacker News

Introducing Cloud Functions for Firebase

firebase.googleblog.com

121–129 of 129 posts

Re: Introducing Cloud Functions for Firebase

#122
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, how many of those do exist with an internal architecture that will fit the Lambda model?

I'm curious more generally why would somebody use Lambda at all? Surely its far more expensive than running on your own servers (or instances), no?

Firebase users don't want to run their own servers.

Re: Introducing Cloud Functions for Firebase

#123
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I remember when Parse offered these cloud functions back in 2012... It was a game-changer for "Backend-as-a-Service."

Wait till Google axes Firebase with no warning How many times can devs be burned, are we all masochists or just not have any memory of the last project that offered all this

I don't understand all the firebase and parse clones. They are not significantly better than firebase and they all entail vendor lock-in. The only real alternative is couchdb which unfortunately lacks document level read permissions (and filtered replication wastes storage) and still requires you to have an additional minimal server for the signup and passwort reset process.

Re: Introducing Cloud Functions for Firebase

#124
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. All events are asynchronous. This use case is best simulated by having clients post to a queue. Cloud functions then either discards or applies writes in that queue.

You should add this technique to the docs! It makes you realize that the Cloud Functions feature is a lot more powerful than you might initially think.

A lot of people use the Firebase Queue library for this:

https://github.com/firebase/firebase-queue

Re: Introducing Cloud Functions for Firebase

#125
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Image magick's binaries are already installed on the image. Any native binary node module that has a preinstall script should work too. If you hit an unsupported syscall error, contact firebase support at firebase.google.com/contact/troubleshooting and we'll triage.

404. That's an error. The requested URL was not found on this server. That's all we know.

https://firebase.google.com/support/contact/troubleshooting/

Re: Introducing Cloud Functions for Firebase

#126

This looks like a worthy competitor to AWS Lambda, but I'm disappointed by the unalterable limit of 400 concurrent invocations of a function. (The "Quotas" page says "Max concurrent functions" is 400, with "Can be increased" as "No." https://cloud.google.com/functions/quotas ) One of the cool things about AWS Lambda is that you can use it as a short-term supercomputer with thousands of threads. We (Stanford/UCSD ExCa…

BTW AWS Lambda do have concurrent execution[1] limits which by default seems to be set to 100 per region[2]

[1]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/concurrent-exec...

[2]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html#lim...

Re: Introducing Cloud Functions for Firebase

#127
post #42
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, which percentage of clients will need more than that?

Any service with more than 400 users that want to run a batch process for each user in constant time with respect to number of users.

Wouldn't this still require linear time to scan a database and map users to work?

Re: Introducing Cloud Functions for Firebase

#128
Built our app, Wander, an IRC-like chat app, 100% with Firebase. We've been using Firebase Queue to get server scripting abilities. Can't wait to migrate to using Cloud Functions instead, just waiting for the (awesome) team at Firebase to iron out any teething beta-related issues.

If only Realm made their server-side scripting available for free (or much less than the $1.5k/mo they're asking for Enterprise). That would give Firebase a run for their money.

Post reply on HN