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Google is killing Fabric in mid-2019, pushes developers to Firebase
- tobltobs 8y agoIn 2020: Google is killing Firebase in mid-2021, pushes developers to [NextGreatToolWhatever]
- sahin-boydas 8y agoso true.
- tango24 8y agoIn 2025: Google decides to focus only on Search, Maps, and Mail; shuts down or divests all 243 other "side projects".
- vinceguidry 8y agoIn 2030: app developers band together and refuse all new technology. In 3030: we're still using Firebase 2030 edition.
- hinkley 8y agoVernor Vinge has a character who comes out of cryo and discovers that code he wrote 500 years ago is still in production. It’s just under layers and layers of abstraction. He proceeds to pwn a bunch of hardware to aid a counter-conspiracy.
- tty7 8y agoWhat book?? That sounds like an awesome read
- danibx 8y agoA Fire Upon the Deep
- notsofastbuddy 8y agoI think it's the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky. I thought A Fire Upon the Deep had even cooler concepts though.
- mrdoops 8y agoBoth are great reads. Fire Upon the Deep had some cooler concepts, but narrative-wise I prefer Deepness in the sky. The emotional response I had to the memory-control-slavery aspects made my blood boil.
- justinclift 8y agoYeah, seems to be A Deepness in the Sky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky#Interstellar_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky#Interste... Recently read A Fire Upon the Deep personally, and don't recall much/any mention of it there. :)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- avinium 8y agoI was thinking exactly the same thing!
- small_fish 8y agoGreat book. "What specialty do we need the most?" "You mean that can bring us the most income? Obviously: Programmer-Archeologist."
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sahin-boydas 8y agoIn 2019: Google decides to focus on Google Analytics and shuts down Firebase
- rohan1024 8y agoDammit not inbox. I've been using it since the beginning. You know this is the kind of stuff that prevents me from diving too deep into there tech and products. I love flutter but I'm scared about its fate. Flutter, Dart, Fuchsia these are some great technologies but they might end up in bin some day. In the end, I tell myself, I'm just a user. Imagine what must be the state of developers who spent years working on these products but then this happens in entire industry. It's just I expected better from Google.
- dingdingdang 8y agoThis is why we need truly distributed webapps rather than monolithic tied-to-domain apps. Doing this right is a hard problem and many of current solutions are still essentially centralized despite their reliance on certain aspects of P2P.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoOpen standards are superior to the complexity of distributed webapps. I can port my Gmail account to Fastmail with a few clicks. There's no lock in with my email data. I can put my mail anywhere! That should be the goal of all hosted data; portability, so you're never beholden to a SaaS provider.
- omnimus 8y agoBut this is also starting to not be true. Gmail is very slowly adding features not in smtp/imap and one day they might just break away and have their closed email. This happened on multiple occasions with xmpp. At one point you could write from icq to hangouts to facebook messanger. After companies gathered critical mass of users they turned off federation. This is one of the main reasons people use facebook messanger (almost everyone has it) and this might happen to gmail quite easily. Almost everyone had gmail at some point so this idea is pretty possible. Many people would then keep gmail account just to comunicate with people who dont have email.
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- Uhhrrr 8y agoPhew, I was worried they were somehow killing http://www.fabfile.org/ http://www.fabfile.org/.
- jihadjihad 8y agoWow, it looks like they finally added support for Python 3.4+. I had kind of abandoned Fabric due to the lack of support past 2.7...this is fantastic news!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 8y agoThis is one area where self hosted solidly wins over anything service oriented: you are in control to the point that you, and not some company somewhere can make the call on when a product is no longer viable. The decoupling that we had with licensed software that you run on infrastructure that you control is pretty close to ideal for the customer. You give the provider of the software a one time payment and after that it literally is your problem. At the same time that is what enabled SaaS, companies do not like it when they have one-shot income over something that might generate recurring revenues, and end-users do not want to have to deal with the hassle of installing, maintaining, backing up, keeping secure and updating all this software. Even so, every time I sign up for some SaaS component I am very much aware that I'm giving up something precious in terms of control, and every time I read an announcement like this one (or the Inbox one the other day), I'm happy that we do our best to use as little services by outsiders as possible.
- aikah 8y agoSaas can get a product out fast. But yes, unless one has some kind of special contract with a Saas company ensuring the continuity of the service as long as one needs it, never rely on Saas for too long, unless the solution is open source. For all we know Firebase could be gone in 2/3 years...
- crooked-v 8y agoThis is why I really like now.sh. They've put a ton of effort into fitting the patterns already in use for self deployments, with only a tiny bit of overhead on that for env vars and domain configuration (~10 short lines of configs for one of my current projects).
- acoard 8y agoYour post made me checkout now.sh which does look really cool, but it really is a poor example here. * It's a SaaS with monthly fees. * now itself doesn't support self-hosting (i.e. the `now` binary will always use the now.sh backend) * Consequently, if now.sh closes down you can't continue to use it. * When it comes to hosting the code you upload, it appears to require you to use a cloud hosting provider (Aws, Azure, etc). You can't point it to a box of your choosing.
- segmondy 8y agoThe first step to using Google is to seek an alternative or to accept the reality that at some point the good times must come to an end.
- wolco 8y agoWhy move to firebase when it will be shutdown when it becomes useful?
- pythonaut_16 8y agoFirebase seems to be pretty integrated with Google's GCP strategy, as well as Android push notifications with FCM. Not saying concern over Google's commitment to various tools is unfounded, but it seems that generally things that are tied into their core goals are pretty safe. GCP is very important to Google, Inbox was an interesting UI built on top of Gmail.
- kuschku 8y agoFCM is only the third in a row of push notification solutions for Android (preceded by C2DM and GCM), and it'll be replaced someday, too.
- amaccuish 8y agoFirebase is the worst name ever. Literally it describes absolutely nothing. I really wish Google would take a look at naming.
- jazoom 8y agoGoogle acquired that company. And the name even has half the word "database" in it, which is much more descriptive than most tech names.
- FireBeyond 8y agoYou know what else happened around Firebase? I was a customer of Divshot, a "static web hosting service" that was merged into the Firebase team at Google, so it's not quite as clear as made out.
- jazoom 8y agoMy point was Google didn't name the product.
- kenhwang 8y agoJust a reminder that, if you critically depend on a IaaS/PaaS/SaaS, you should be able to trivially replace it, sometimes as quickly as overnight. Having the service be completely open source so you can self-host generally helps, as does open protocols and standards. Especially important when it's a Google service given their historical speed of deprecation and abruptness in announcement.
- WA 8y agoIf you can trivially replace it with something else overnight, the SaaS might be a bit too simplistic to use in the first place, no?
- kenhwang 8y agoI guess the nuance of my statement would be, trivially replaceable doesn't mean build a better product. Good examples of what I consider trivially replaceable would be services like Pingdom, DNS, S3, Cloud SQL since you can either easily build a "good enough" version, switch to another provider, or deploy your own from source. Good examples of services that are very hard to switch off of are things like Cloud Firestore or AWS Lamba.
- henryfjordan 8y agoOr there is healthy competition in the space. I think OP means you should write your interfaces with SaaS such that changing to a different provider is relatively easy (just rewrite a little client code or something to fit the new provider to your abstractions).
- skybrian 8y agoThat seems a little exaggerated. It looks like Google Cloud terms of service promise a year's notice for products in general availability. I don't think they've broken that promise? Though of course, even with notice, migration can still be annoying.
- kenhwang 8y ago
- xrd 8y agoFirebase is revolutionary. If you haven't used it, it means you can remove your reliance on all the server side logic you currently maintain. It is a huge philosophical change but is the perfect complement to serverless architectures. This is smart by Google. AWS AppSync provides much of the same functionality but gives you the benefit (if you already know Graphql) of Graphql. Or, it forces you to learn about graphql, which is also the downside. Forcing Fabric customers into the firebase ecosystem makes it look like this was a cheap acquisition from Twitter after all. The huge win with either platform commitment is you simply focus on your data and forget about the challenging problem of syncing that data across all the platforms. That's (multi client sync) a big, big, big challenge and no one does it well on their own.
- argo12 8y agoWe follow this exact same architectural approach at hasura.io as well. We are an opensource realtime GraphQL engine on Postgres and just last week we announced event-triggers on Postgres that allows you to call webhooks/serverless functions anytime there is a change in your database. (I work at Hasura)
- aplummer 8y agoI’ve found it’s only good vs your own stack for small prototypes and MVPs, and that the debt builds up faster than anything else I’ve ever used (the cost too!) but YMMV. I use the analytics heavily though, the built in network reliability and performance analytics you get for 1 line have literally saved my company millions of dollars. Mentally it was hard to ditch direct GA but it’s really so great.
- nslog 8y agoHave you seen the AWS Amplify CLI along with the new GraphQL transform and codegen features? It largely eliminates the "forces you to learn about graphql" downside that you mention. Here is more info: https://aws-amplify.github.io/amplify-js/media/api_guide#using-aws-appsync https://aws-amplify.github.io/amplify-js/media/api_guide#usi...
- dabit3 8y agoOne additional feature of AppSync is that you're not tied to any particular database implementation, you can use any database (or data source for that matter, including existing REST APIs & Lambda functions).