3 ms·

It depends on your scale. As a solo dev just being able to point my apps to firebase and not worry about it saves a ridiculous amount of time. At Uber's scale

It depends on your scale. As a solo dev just being able to point my apps to firebase and not worry about it saves a ridiculous amount of time. At Uber's scale they probably have to tweak Dynamo and other services so much they might as well bring em in house. I'm a bit surprised we haven't seen a new AWS, something like Walmart Web Services.

wongarsu 2y ago
On the other hand as a solo dev `sudo apt-get install postgresql` plus a short tweak of your pg_hba.conf and a quick script to run pg_dump every night is about as much work as setting up a cloud service. Managed databases provide a lot of useful features, especially if shit hits the fan. I'm not saying you shouldn't use them. But the work you put into reasonable self-hosted services and reasonable managed services often scale at a surprisingly similar pace.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  Alright, what about Auth or other features Firebase has built in ? I still have to host it somewhere.
  - BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    Auth is included in your stack, e.g: django comes with it. Plus you own the accounts, so you are not locked in. Sync is the firebase kill feature, but most apps can live without it.
    - 999900000999 2y ago
      For a side project it's not that serious. Firebase is ready to go without me thinking of the details. If I'm using Flutter or React, I already have a nice client side sdk to use. The 12th of never when I need to scale it I can switch to a different stack. Firebase functions allows me to do some server side data manipulation. That said, if I was at work and needed to propose something I'd probably spend more time thinking of this. But for all my side projects firebase is my goto. Let's just say we're having a competition to see who can crank out a basic crud app first. You're not beating me with Flutter and Firebase.
      - faddypaddy34 2y ago
        Then if you are successful one day you can cry on social media about your large surprise bills.
        manquer 2y ago
        That is a big “IF” . 99.99% side projects are not successful, you should not be planning architecture expecting to win the lottery . Even if you did, on premise self-hosting does not save from scaling costs or problems . If you are successful with firebase , all you get is the bill, firebase will definitely scale without sweat or intervention, for most businesses (side or small) that is better tradeoff . If you are successful with a self hosted solution , you are likely to be down when the peak traffic or hug of death hits that is when you need it most to work, the app will fail. This is even assuming intimate expertise on how to scale quickly and having many done it many times before with no mis steps and no researching on what to do. A professionally managed service at firebase level which is shared infra has already both the capacity and code tuned to scale for any one tenant without effort or lag . Self hosted infra is optimized for cost and usage pattern of one small tenant, no matter how good your scale out skills and autoscaling code is , there is going be a lag between you and something like firebase which will never notice your spike and issues around it. This is the crux of success behind multi-tenant IaaS and PaaS, the reason Amazon opened up their infra to the world originally. All the way even to Amazon.com scale of SRE skills and budgets, hosting on AWS will always be better and cheaper for them than using isolated infra only for them given their load pattern fluctuates pretty heavily . Amazon.com would still run AWS even if was losing money a bit ,because it would make them more resilient and their infra costs cheaper . The best analogy I have heard is it similar to insurance, works better with more and more users with diverse usage and risk patterns
        999900000999 2y ago
        For me the answer is much simpler. I find coding backends to be very boring. It's just not something I want to do during my spare time. Managed infra is almost always easier to get going.
Gorath 2y ago
> I'm a bit surprised we haven't seen a new AWS, something like Walmart Web Services. Don’t know if you have heard but there are these brand new services called Google cloud and Microsoft azure. Not to mention all the legacy saas providers e.g. oracle that existed prior to aws.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  Both of those are tech companies, AWS if the official story is to be believed originated as an internal tool of an e-commerce website.
  - kolinko 2y ago
    Why wouldn’t it be believed?
    - xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
      For one it's neither the official story, nor true.

wongarsu 2y ago

On the other hand as a solo dev `sudo apt-get install postgresql` plus a short tweak of your pg_hba.conf and a quick script to run pg_dump every night is about as much work as setting up a cloud service. Managed databases provide a lot of useful features, especially if shit hits the fan. I'm not saying you shouldn't use them. But the work you put into reasonable self-hosted services and reasonable managed services often scale at a surprisingly similar pace.

999900000999 2y ago
Alright, what about Auth or other features Firebase has built in ? I still have to host it somewhere.
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  Auth is included in your stack, e.g: django comes with it. Plus you own the accounts, so you are not locked in. Sync is the firebase kill feature, but most apps can live without it.
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    For a side project it's not that serious. Firebase is ready to go without me thinking of the details. If I'm using Flutter or React, I already have a nice client side sdk to use. The 12th of never when I need to scale it I can switch to a different stack. Firebase functions allows me to do some server side data manipulation. That said, if I was at work and needed to propose something I'd probably spend more time thinking of this. But for all my side projects firebase is my goto. Let's just say we're having a competition to see who can crank out a basic crud app first. You're not beating me with Flutter and Firebase.
    - faddypaddy34 2y ago
      Then if you are successful one day you can cry on social media about your large surprise bills.
      - manquer 2y ago
        That is a big “IF” . 99.99% side projects are not successful, you should not be planning architecture expecting to win the lottery . Even if you did, on premise self-hosting does not save from scaling costs or problems . If you are successful with firebase , all you get is the bill, firebase will definitely scale without sweat or intervention, for most businesses (side or small) that is better tradeoff . If you are successful with a self hosted solution , you are likely to be down when the peak traffic or hug of death hits that is when you need it most to work, the app will fail. This is even assuming intimate expertise on how to scale quickly and having many done it many times before with no mis steps and no researching on what to do. A professionally managed service at firebase level which is shared infra has already both the capacity and code tuned to scale for any one tenant without effort or lag . Self hosted infra is optimized for cost and usage pattern of one small tenant, no matter how good your scale out skills and autoscaling code is , there is going be a lag between you and something like firebase which will never notice your spike and issues around it. This is the crux of success behind multi-tenant IaaS and PaaS, the reason Amazon opened up their infra to the world originally. All the way even to Amazon.com scale of SRE skills and budgets, hosting on AWS will always be better and cheaper for them than using isolated infra only for them given their load pattern fluctuates pretty heavily . Amazon.com would still run AWS even if was losing money a bit ,because it would make them more resilient and their infra costs cheaper . The best analogy I have heard is it similar to insurance, works better with more and more users with diverse usage and risk patterns
        999900000999 2y ago
        For me the answer is much simpler. I find coding backends to be very boring. It's just not something I want to do during my spare time. Managed infra is almost always easier to get going.

Gorath 2y ago

> I'm a bit surprised we haven't seen a new AWS, something like Walmart Web Services. Don’t know if you have heard but there are these brand new services called Google cloud and Microsoft azure. Not to mention all the legacy saas providers e.g. oracle that existed prior to aws.

999900000999 2y ago
Both of those are tech companies, AWS if the official story is to be believed originated as an internal tool of an e-commerce website.
- kolinko 2y ago
  Why wouldn’t it be believed?
  - xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
    For one it's neither the official story, nor true.