i used to be scared using app engine, but this was for start ups that really couldn't afford using anything else. They gained so much time and saved so much money, it was worth the risk.
But firebase ?? Unless you need real-time capabilities at the DB level, i really don't see the point.
We use Firebase (and Firebase Functions :fire:) for most of our stuff. Then have a few things running on App Engine. What are you building? I'm a big fan of firebase if it makes sense for what you are building!
thanks for the tip. I just checked out their demo page and it looks pretty sweet. I'm mostly still working on applications that have plenty of relational data and server-side data processing, so I don't think Firebase will be of immediate use for me, but I'm definitely impressed. The speed and ease is very nice.
I just build a service/website last weekend using App Engine and Firebase. After reading these comments and this blog post, I think I might migrate it over to AWS. I didn't realize that
Firebase was so unreliable.
I've had only good experiences with firebase. They added an HTTP api, web hosting, multiple security rule preprocessors (pain point), and got faster and cheaper. Yeah only good things.
Way to risky not to use for startups, IMO. What would you prefer, spending half your time doing backend development to get a system that might be 80% as reliable as Firebase on the off chance that your startup will survive long enough for your custom engineered solution to bare fruit, or spending all your time actually building your product and launching quickly so you can determine whether or not your startup is even viable?
Firebase is an incredibly powerful tool, and in a sense is a "democratizing force" in web development. Now anyone can build a complete web application without needing to know anything about setting up servers, content delivery networks, AWS (which is still quite difficult to use), and scaling. I teach kids as young as 10 years old to build iOS apps and websites with Firebase - they can develop locally and push to Firebase hosting with a single command. After exploring this new update, I can say with confidence that literally everything is easy-to-use now.
Whenever there is a Firebase announcement there are many replies along the lines of "this won't work for me because it's owned by Google, may be discontinued, doesn't have on-premise solution, etc". If these are your thoughts then you are missing the point of Firebase. It enables small web development shops like mine to focus on building beautiful web applications without having to give up manpower toward backend engineering. The cost of using Firebase is peanuts compared to the savings in employee hours.
Perhaps some day we will have to migrate elsewhere, but I find that possibility extremely unlikely because the clear amount of effort it took to create the Google-y version means this is a long-term play.
firebase is probably the most hyped and overused tech I've seen. I've run into far too many startups that went to firebase because they wanted to scale fast and didn't realize how limited firebase was for queries.
If you're starting a startup, use postgres for your database. it will handle damn near anything and you can spawn off functionality into microservices as they become bottle necks as you scale.
Hell, postgres lets you write database extensions that perform novel behavior. I saw one the other day that automatically syncs data to elastic search. Wouldn't be that hard to envision having writes to certain tables sync to firebase if you need subscriptions on records for certain parts of your app.
I've used Firebase for a couple MVPs. It is very fast to develop on. It makes it easy to get a web or mobile app up in a few hours once you know what you're doing. It is definitely possible to be that fast using other technologies, but the learning curve is higher.
When you're just experimenting, trying to find market fit and get something to stick, Firebase is a decent solution. I haven't tried anything sizeable on it though. Eventually, I'm sure we would've migrated if we were successful enough.
I'm a bit surprised at the negativity here. I have used Firebase for 11 projects and have had no issues at all. I love that I can quickly and easily set up services that work well together.
For most projects I use the realtime database and authentication. The database is very fast and the realtime feature is essential for some of my projects. Authentication is free no matter how many monthly users I have.
I also use storage and hosting, where I get excellent performance.
All but one of my projects work within the free tier. The one project that sometimes exceeds the free tier is generally less than $1 per month. My projects are fairly small, but I know that for large projects, there might be more economical solutions somewhere else.
For me, I would highly recommend Firebase to other developers.
I know I'm a little biased since I wrote the library, but we use Firebase in production and it works just fine for us. Auth, real time, scalability, and security out of the box is why I love Firebase. Not saying any other option is bad, I've just had plenty of success with Firebase.
For anyone actually serious about prototyping a SaaS, getting MVP out the door, try firebase. It solves a lot of the problems in the article for you. It’s flawed and annoying but I believe indie hackers still runs on it.
It’s relatively expensive, but if you consider productivity gains it’s basically free for a long time.
But firebase ?? Unless you need real-time capabilities at the DB level, i really don't see the point.
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