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Firebase is a revolutionary tool, and this is the last piece that was missing from the big picture. It's hard to imagine a Firebase-driven world today, but in 5

Firebase is a revolutionary tool, and this is the last piece that was missing from the big picture. It's hard to imagine a Firebase-driven world today, but in 5 years developers will need to quickly deploy and iterate on real-time applications, for which a system like this is ideal. Lay out your database, set up login and security rules, and deploy your application, all through the same service. However, the lack of benchmarks is a bit disconcerting. Hosting and SSL are great, but if the page loads are slow I'd rather pay money to host them elsewhere. Also, there is the single-point-of-failure problem, which materialized yesterday when Firebase went down. Although the outage was only for a couple minutes (a lot faster than it would take me to troubleshoot a downed Rails app), it made me realize the dangers of relying on a single system for all of your web application's needs. Overall, I think Firebase is just going to get better and better. They still need to integrate payments, file upload, and the ability to make API calls to external services, but by adding hosting they are demonstrating a desire to provide services for the full stack. Also, there is a brilliant team of people behind Firebase, so I'm sure that my ideas for Firebase are only the tip of the iceberg.

mikelehen 12y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We'd love to know what benchmarks would make you feel more comfortable. Internally, we have a lot of monitoring and diagnostics to make sure everything is running optimally. Downtime like yesterday's is rare and will become even rarer as we continue to advance our infrastructure. In general, I agree with your point though. That's why I'd recommend using 3rd-party monitoring / measurement, even if we did expose more benchmarks for you. It's important to understand your external dependencies and verify they meet the service level you require.
snide 12y ago
Have to agree with this. We built Webhook.com on top of Firebase, and it's been transformative. We built a CMS system similar to Wordpress that loads on a single cms.html page that loads off a static server. Its just, well, I never thought it'd be possible. Service has been excellent. Doing everything through JSON was initially a little different. There's a lot of times when you really want things to be relational and although you can come up with interesting ways to do it, most of it is tedious. That's really my only complaint and is pretty specific to what we're building. Other than that I really do see this model of storage as the future. Really, really impressive stuff.

mikelehen 12y ago

Thanks for the feedback! We'd love to know what benchmarks would make you feel more comfortable. Internally, we have a lot of monitoring and diagnostics to make sure everything is running optimally. Downtime like yesterday's is rare and will become even rarer as we continue to advance our infrastructure. In general, I agree with your point though. That's why I'd recommend using 3rd-party monitoring / measurement, even if we did expose more benchmarks for you. It's important to understand your external dependencies and verify they meet the service level you require.

snide 12y ago

Have to agree with this. We built Webhook.com on top of Firebase, and it's been transformative. We built a CMS system similar to Wordpress that loads on a single cms.html page that loads off a static server. Its just, well, I never thought it'd be possible. Service has been excellent. Doing everything through JSON was initially a little different. There's a lot of times when you really want things to be relational and although you can come up with interesting ways to do it, most of it is tedious. That's really my only complaint and is pretty specific to what we're building. Other than that I really do see this model of storage as the future. Really, really impressive stuff.