We're building a single page app. Is it possible to use Firebase Hosting only for SSL and static assets and our own servers(exposing REST APIs) for dynamic content?
Introducing Firebase Hosting
21–30 of 79 posts
Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting
#22Why are connections always the selling point for these real time services? Are they actually the most expensive thing to scale or just the most required therefore most profitable? Edit: The surcharges for going over the limits seem a bit high. (Candle Plan: $0.25 each additional connection). Get some spike in traffic that causes 2000 visitors to your site for an hour and pay $500 lol
For context, 2000 concurrent connections would be quite a large site. If you're hitting 2000 concurrents, $500 probably wouldn't be an issue for you. It's also worth noting that Firebase employs burstable billing at the 95th percentile, so only sustained overuse within the monthly billing period will result in a surcharge.
As for why we charge for connections in general, they do tend to be the most expensive thing to scale. They're also useful as a proxy of how "big" a site is (in terms of users). They're kind of the analog to "page views" in today's world of single-page-apps that update in real-time
Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting
#23Why are connections always the selling point for these real time services? Are they actually the most expensive thing to scale or just the most required therefore most profitable? Edit: The surcharges for going over the limits seem a bit high. (Candle Plan: $0.25 each additional connection). Get some spike in traffic that causes 2000 visitors to your site for an hour and pay $500 lol
Billing is based on 95th percentile usage, so you wouldn't have to pay overages if you exceed the limits for a couple hours (e.g. you got front-paged on TechCrunch, HN, or Reddit)
From https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html:
> Because we use 95th percentile billing, you won't be charged for your overages 5% of the time (about 1.5 days each month).
Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting
#24We're building a single page app. Is it possible to use Firebase Hosting only for SSL and static assets and our own servers(exposing REST APIs) for dynamic content?
Yes. We think our hosting service and realtime backend complement each other nicely for building modern web apps, but you certainly don't have to use both. :-)
Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting
#25We're building a single page app. Is it possible to use Firebase Hosting only for SSL and static assets and our own servers(exposing REST APIs) for dynamic content?
Yes, although the real-time database that comes packaged with a paid plan wouldn't be used. If you're looking to fully utilize Firebase you could add a live chat feature or real-time commenting to your existing website, while maintaining your existing API for dynamic content.
You can make everything Firebase-related happen at the JavaScript level (which is why hosting is valuable to Firebase users in the first place).
Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting
#26Firebase is a revolutionary tool, and this is the last piece that was missing from the big picture. It's hard to imagine a Firebase-driven world today, but in 5 years developers will need to quickly deploy and iterate on real-time applications, for which a system like this is ideal. Lay out your database, set up login and security rules, and deploy your application, all through the same service. However, the lack of…
Thanks for the feedback! We'd love to know what benchmarks would make you feel more comfortable. Internally, we have a lot of monitoring and diagnostics to make sure everything is running optimally. Downtime like yesterday's is rare and will become even rarer as we continue to advance our infrastructure.
In general, I agree with your point though. That's why I'd recommend using 3rd-party monitoring / measurement, even if we did expose more benchmarks for you. It's important to understand your external dependencies and verify they meet the service level you require.
Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the feedback! Now that we've got the core deploy / rollback tooling in place, we're definitely looking for ways to plug into other common workflows (git, Dropbox, etc.). Stay tuned!
A git deployment would be great. Similar to heroku I guess.
Git integration is on our roadmap. However, you can also set this up yourself now by adding your own git hook that calls 'firebase deploy' on push.
For more information, see the documentation for the commandline tool here: https://www.firebase.com/docs/command-line-tool.html
Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting
#28Hi HN, I'm the lead developer on Firebase Hosting and the post’s author. We're trying to build something that's both simple to use and a serious production grade product. We think we're pretty close to the mark but we'd love to hear how we can improve it. Let us know in the comments (or email me at chris@firebase.com).
Can you provide any background on Firebase's thinking for where this, strategy-wise, fits into the platform? For example, is this supposed to be more of an add-on service for folks who already use Firebase or intended to woo new developers?
In short, both. :-) This was a commonly-voiced pain point for our existing customers and fits very well with our vision to make Firebase the best platform for building modern apps.
But when we do something, we like to do it "right" and so we also think Firebase Hosting comes with a very compelling feature set (Simple Deploy/Rollback, Automatically-provisioned SSL, and a global CDN). So we're optimistic it'll also attract new developers to the Firebase platform.
Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting
#29Would someone here kindly be able to comment about the usability of Parse vs. Firebase vs. AWS JS SDK? I've looked into all three. They seem comparable because they are "no-backend" solutions and NoSQL stores.
It seems like the AWS JS SDK is the youngest, least mature (there are surprisingly few results on Google), and perhaps most difficult to use, but it's sure nice that I can manage my existing AWS stuff with a client-side JS SDK, now. If you use AWS JS SDK with DynamoDB, isn't it as if you've built your own Firebase?
Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting
#30Hey Firebase team, I really liked how you did the https://www.firebase.com/tutorial/ !