Hey HN, Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative. We're building the features of Firebase using enterprise-grade open source tools. We're particularly fo

Hey HN, Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative. We're building the features of Firebase using enterprise-grade open source tools. We're particularly focused on scalability. We take proven tools like Postgres, and we make them as easy to use as Firebase. Today Supabase is releasing Storage. This is our second launch of Launch Week[1]. The linked blog post goes into depth around the technical implementation, so I’ll just give a recap for the people who jump straight to comments (like me). Backend: We are using S3 as a File store. Since most storage platforms have an S3-compatible API, this made the most sense. We will add more providers (like Backblaze) in the future. Middleware: This is the key part. We assessed a lot of tools including Ceph, Swift, Minio and Zenko. These are all awesome, but they aren’t tightly integrated with Postgres. The tooling in Supabase is centered around Postgres: the APIs use PostgREST[2], the Realtime engine hooks into Postgres’ WAL[3] and we use GoTrue[4] + Postgres Row Level Security[5] for Auth. Since we already use RLS for Auth, we decided to leverage the same functionality for managing access to Files. We created an API [6] which wraps everything up into a nice interface. This obviously goes against our philosophy of “support existing tools” - the linked blog post describes our rationale more thoroughly. Future: This is very much an “alpha” release of Storage. We have a lot of great features planned for a CDN, automatic resizing, optimizations, and since it’s using Postgres there potentially are a few neat things we can do with Full Text Search and Data Loading. A few of the team will be here to answer any questions - my cofounder @awalias and @steve-chavez from PostgREST, @inian, and @1_over_n [1] Launch week: https://supabase.io/new/blog/2021/03/25/launch-week https://supabase.io/new/blog/2021/03/25/launch-week [2] PostgREST: http://postgrest.org/ http://postgrest.org/ [3] Realtime: https://github.com/supabase/realtime https://github.com/supabase/realtime [4] GoTrue: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/docker https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/docker [5] RLS: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-rowsecurity.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-rowsecurity.html [6] Storage API: https://github.com/supabase/storage-api https://github.com/supabase/storage-api