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It's worth noting that Cloud Datastore's follow-on, Cloud Firestore, does provide strong consistency, and includes a "Datastore mode" that supports the Datastor

It's worth noting that Cloud Datastore's follow-on, Cloud Firestore, does provide strong consistency, and includes a "Datastore mode" that supports the Datastore API. Firestore is currently in beta, but once it's GA we will be migrating all Datastore users to Firestore: https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/upgrade-to-firestore https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/upgrade-to-firestore Disclaimer: I work on Cloud Datastore/Firestore.

stingraycharles 8y ago
I always got the impression that Firestore is more aimed towards mobile apps rather than backend applications, and as such more or less a different kind of product. Is this not the case?
- davidgay 8y ago
  Datastore was initially designed for use from App Engine, i.e., an easy start, no management, automatic scaling environment ("serverless" to use the current in-vogue term). I would view the Firestore API as a further extension (the "Datastore Mode" functionality was always an element of the design) of that paradigm, extending to the case where you have no trusted piece of code to mediate requests to the database, thus allowing direct use from, e.g., mobile apps (at which point other issues such as disconnected operation surface). So not so much a "different kind of product" and more a product that supports a strict superset of use cases.
- thesandlord 8y ago
  While Firestore has a Android/iOS/Web SDK, it also has great backend support (Python, Java, Node, Go, Ruby, C#, PHP) as well. The "realtime" features of Firestore are better suited for mobile IMO, but using Firestore as a scalable, consistent, document/nosql database for your backend is definetly a good use for it. I actually think most of the server SDKs don't even expose many of the realtime APIs. Maybe they will in the future, but it shows that you can use Firestore like a normal database just fine. (I work for GCP)

stingraycharles 8y ago

I always got the impression that Firestore is more aimed towards mobile apps rather than backend applications, and as such more or less a different kind of product. Is this not the case?

davidgay 8y ago
Datastore was initially designed for use from App Engine, i.e., an easy start, no management, automatic scaling environment ("serverless" to use the current in-vogue term). I would view the Firestore API as a further extension (the "Datastore Mode" functionality was always an element of the design) of that paradigm, extending to the case where you have no trusted piece of code to mediate requests to the database, thus allowing direct use from, e.g., mobile apps (at which point other issues such as disconnected operation surface). So not so much a "different kind of product" and more a product that supports a strict superset of use cases.
thesandlord 8y ago
While Firestore has a Android/iOS/Web SDK, it also has great backend support (Python, Java, Node, Go, Ruby, C#, PHP) as well. The "realtime" features of Firestore are better suited for mobile IMO, but using Firestore as a scalable, consistent, document/nosql database for your backend is definetly a good use for it. I actually think most of the server SDKs don't even expose many of the realtime APIs. Maybe they will in the future, but it shows that you can use Firestore like a normal database just fine. (I work for GCP)