Live data from Hacker News

Firebase outages and misleading status reporting

medium.com

11–20 of 52 posts

Re: Firebase outages and misleading status reporting

#13
We had the same exact problem with Firebase Realtime Database. Our product uses it heavily and is dependent on its latency so we notice anytime an issue appear.

The unacceptable thing is : not only outages are fairly common, many smaller, briefer outages and disruptions are not even reported. For example the day after the 2 hour outage mentioned in the article, there was an issue where while writing to the database seemingly successful, but the clients listening to the changes would NOT receive the notification that the data their are observing was updated, for more than 30 minutes. It wasn't reported in Firebase's status dashboard.

Google bought Firebase back then, and to replace Firebase Realtime Database, Google developed Firebase Firestore (now in beta). I suspect that Firebase Realtime Database isn't receiving much attention these days and that the service will be closed after some time.

Re: Firebase outages and misleading status reporting

#17

I think that PaaS and BaaS where you don't have access to the back end is a dead end. It's going to go the way of Windows Server. Open source solutions will always win in the end when it comes to developers.

People also balked during the transition away from FTP. SSHing into servers is precisely the thing you want to get away from whether it's to change code or to hotfix your nginx.conf or to do a quick apt-get install.

Doesn't mean that we don't need SSH ever, but 99% of the time it's something we use because we're too lazy to setup automation.

I reckon you're using open-source here to mean self-hosted, but that doesn't really change anything. For example, the reason every small company I've worked at didn't have a way to analyze their logs/stderr and coincide them with other events for debugging was because they didn't, not because they couldn't.

Re: Firebase outages and misleading status reporting

#18
I stopped using the realtime database once firestore was released in beta. So haven't experienced the downtime you have demonstrated in the status graphs, but Firebase's SLA [1] for realtime database apparently guarantees service credit for monthly uptime less than 99.95%. To corroborate your observations, check if you received this credit:

Less than 99.95% but equal to or greater than 99.0%: 10% credit

Less than 99.0%: 30% credit

[1] https://firebase.google.com/terms/service-level-agreement/

Re: Firebase outages and misleading status reporting

#20

I think that PaaS and BaaS where you don't have access to the back end is a dead end. It's going to go the way of Windows Server. Open source solutions will always win in the end when it comes to developers.

You are always going to have to rely on other service providers for critical things - networking, power, etc. I don’t think there is going to be some massive move for every business to be in control of every aspect of their supply chain. It simply isn’t feasible.
Post reply on HN