Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#161

Post by andygeers » Wed, Oct 04, 2017, 1:25 PM UTC

fiokoden wrote: post #157

Just never use Google for building applications. They have invested heavily over the lifetime of the company in avoiding providing support. That reputation can never be revived. Google does not have direct customer support in its DNA, it has the opposite, whatever that is. They have not demonstrated relentless commitment to being available to resolve issues, and nothing matters more than this if you've bet your compa…

Personally, this has not been my experience of the Firebase team actually - for me they have always gone out of their way to help find solutions and give all kinds of advice.

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#162

Post by adufetel » Wed, Oct 04, 2017, 1:32 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #153

jamest wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Some quick context for those not aware of the initial incident: In May we fixed two bugs in our pricing pipeline that caused some users to see price increases. Bug 1: we under-reported bandwidth (in particular SSL overhead) Bug 2: we were not enforcing quotas for all accounts. For most users, the fixes had little-to-no impact. For a few users who were using the Realtime Database with large volumes of small reads and…

> You could mitigate this impact by updating your client code Where can I read about this?

You can find more on this in the "understanding billing docs" : https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/usage/billing

Look for the optimize billing section

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#163

Post by us0r » Wed, Oct 04, 2017, 3:28 PM UTC

So read through the docs, decided to give the free tier a go and of course they are punishing me for being an existing customer.

"The Blaze billing plan (pay-as-you-go) for Firebase is required for Google projects with billing enabled.

To use the free tier, you must first turn off billing in your Google project."

I don't want 15 "projects". I want to add this to my existing one. Why on earth is this not possible?

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#164

Post by sctb » Wed, Oct 04, 2017, 3:36 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #17

sametmax wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the downvote ? The person is polite and genuinly doesn't know something. Just answer. Besides, a "document database", like many term in computing, can be very confusing. Come on, we all had to be explained what the difference is between a software server vs hardware. This is not different.

> Why the downvote? Smells like ring voting: 4 downvotes in < 0.5 min? @dang?

It doesn't look that way. We're happy to investigate these cases if you feel there's something fishy going on, but the guidelines ask you to please email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can leave the discussions intact.

> Please don't accuse others of astroturfing or shillage. Email us instead and we'll look into it.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#165

Post by tnolet » Wed, Oct 04, 2017, 5:11 PM UTC

habosa wrote: post #140

tnolet wrote: post #123

I'm sorry if I overlooked, but no aggregations? Like calculating sums or averages?

That's correct, no native aggregations right now. See this doc for some more info on how to achieve what you want: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/solutions/aggrega...

Ok,thanks for the helpful link. I'm hoping native aggregations come soon!

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#166

Post by unitboolean » Wed, Oct 04, 2017, 5:50 PM UTC

Cosmos DB from Microsoft Azure seems to be a much better choose, because it provides tons of useful features, but it also compatible with MongoDB, so if they decide to increase prices or shut it down some day, you will be able to use regular MongoDB instead. With Firestore it's not the case and you are locked with a proprietary solution.

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#167

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 04, 2017, 6:16 PM UTC

ultrafez wrote: post #135

sagadotworld wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run entirely on Firebase with Auth, Storage, Hosting, Firestore, and Cloud Functions. As a result, we actually don't have any backend to manage.

Do you think that the time-to-market advantage that using Firebase offers you justifies the (presumably) increased cost when compared to the cost of managing your own infrastructure?

[deleted]

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#168

Post by Abundnce10 » Wed, Oct 04, 2017, 6:17 PM UTC

sagadotworld wrote: post #137

ultrafez wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that the time-to-market advantage that using Firebase offers you justifies the (presumably) increased cost when compared to the cost of managing your own infrastructure?

Yes, as a data point, the other tracker apps are only now beginning to add exchange API integration, while we were able to develop and launch this feature over a month ago. While I like self hosting (was previously a RethinkDB user), from a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense to spend time on operations if it doesn’t give you a competitive advantage. It’s going to be very difficult to outpace a business that…

Can you give a rough estimate on the cost you pay based on the amount of traffic you get to this app? I'm considering using Firestore for my next project but I'd love to hear from your perspective if the cost outweighs the alternative of rolling your own backend.

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#169

Post by sagadotworld » Wed, Oct 04, 2017, 8:03 PM UTC

Abundnce10 wrote: post #168

sagadotworld wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as a data point, the other tracker apps are only now beginning to add exchange API integration, while we were able to develop and launch this feature over a month ago. While I like self hosting (was previously a RethinkDB user), from a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense to spend time on operations if it doesn’t give you a competitive advantage. It’s going to be very difficult to outpace a business that…

Can you give a rough estimate on the cost you pay based on the amount of traffic you get to this app? I'm considering using Firestore for my next project but I'd love to hear from your perspective if the cost outweighs the alternative of rolling your own backend.

The cost is actually less than what we would be paying if we rented dedicated servers. I think the reputation for clouds being expensive comes from people running compute instances 24/7. However, you don't run any compute instances on Firebase. You only pay for operations (read, write, function executions, etc.), and if you structure your app to avoid operations (i.e. through caching), you end up paying very little.

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#170

Post by mbleigh » Wed, Oct 04, 2017, 10:24 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #160

mbleigh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We announced the product, that's a loud public commitment. Once it reaches general availability, it will be covered by the Cloud deprecation policy requiring a minimum of one year notice for deprecation. I'm not sure what other guarantees would even make sense to offer. If anything, I'd look at this announcement as ongoing proof in the magnitude of investment Google is making in Firebase and Cloud.

I'd guess a forward commitment, like a LTS version? That would probably have an adverse effect though, since you'd be the only provider that goes (e.g.) "We will support this product for at least three years from now", implying (to people making Decisions) you'd pull the plug after three years. Maybe publish a long term (5+ year) plan / roadmap? idk.

Yeah, unfortunately this is pretty much an unsolvable problem.

Roadmaps are subject to change and even more subject to be delayed, publishing them tends to disappoint more than reassure. If we gave a forward commitment the questions would just be "why not longer?" or "what happens in X + 1 years?".

All we can do is say what I'm saying now: we stand behind this product 100%, we think it solves real problems for developers, and we really hope people will try it out and find it useful.

I get the doubt, truly I do. But Google's incentives are clearly aligned with Cloud Firestore's success: if you folks use it and grow your app to be successful, we make money. If you use it and really like it, you're more likely to use Firebase and Cloud's other products, which will make us even more money.