Today we're excited to announce Firebase Hosting integration for Google Cloud’s new Cloud Run service. Cloud Run is a fully managed compute platform that enables developers to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests in a language and framework of their choosing. Firebase Hosting integration lets you use this architecture as a backend for a web app or microservice in your Firebase project.
Firebase Hosting is already a convenient and secure way to host sites and microservices. It can serve static pages you upload directly and, with the proper configuration in the firebase.json file, direct incoming requests to Cloud Functions for Firebase to serve dynamic content. This workflow is a one stop shop if you don’t mind working in the NodeJS environment. You can already build a fast site with dynamic content that automatically scales horizontally to meet user demand.
Not every developer wants to work with NodeJS though. Many already have large teams with existing knowledge in other languages and frameworks. Languages such as Go, Ruby, and Java have a huge presence in the server market but are currently absent in Firebase’s existing cloud backend solutions.
Leveraging the power of Google’s own experience building infrastructure for Kubernetes and the efforts of the Knative open source project, Google Cloud Platform now lets you deploy stateless servers. The only requirements are that you can generate a docker image able to interact to HTTP requests on the port specified in the $PORT environment variable for Kubernetes and that you respond within 60 seconds for Firebase Hosting. How does this tie into Firebase Hosting though?
If you’re new to Hosting, you may only be aware of static hosting or the free SSL certificates. To facilitate serving dynamic content, rewrites allow you to hit your cloud functions, which we’ve extended to support Cloud Run as well. With a few minor changes to your firebase.json file, you can now point a specific path to your container:
{ "hosting": { "public": "public", "rewrites": [ { "source": "/cloudrun", "run": { "serviceId": "my-awesome-api", // Optional (default is us-central1) "region": "us-central1", } } ] } }
or use wildcards to expose an entire API
{ "hosting": { "public": "public", "rewrites": [ { "source": "/api/**", "run": { "serviceId": "my-awesome-api", // Optional (default is us-central1) "region": "us-central1", } } ] } }
If you have a dynamic site that doesn’t update very frequently, take advantage of Firebase Hosting’s global CDN (content delivery network) to improve your site’s response time. For example, if you’re using ExpressJS and NodeJS, configure the caching behavior using the Cache-Control header like so:
Cache-Control
res.set('Cache-Control', 'public, max-age=300, s-maxage=600');
which caches the results of a request in the browser (max-age) for 5 minutes and in the CDN (s-maxage) for 10 minutes. With properly tuned cache settings, you can have a fast, flexible, dynamically rendered site that doesn’t need to run your server logic every time the user opens the page.
max-age
s-maxage
Unlike Cloud Functions for Firebase, when you use Cloud Run, you can build an image with any combination of languages and frameworks to handle these requests. Ruby developers can easily pull in Sinatra, you can fire up the Spring framework for Java teams, or check out server side Dart using Shelf to serve content. You don’t have to wait for any official language support -- if you can create a docker container, you can make and deploy backend code. Even if you’re working in high performance computing and your engineering team is trained up in Fortran, you can just leverage that existing knowledge to create a web dashboard with Fortran.io without having to wait for any official support from Google or Firebase.
Similar to Cloud Functions, Cloud Run automatically scales your containers horizontally to meet the demands of your users. There’s no need to manage clusters or node pools; you simply use the resources needed at the time to accomplish the task at hand. One tradeoff is that, also like Cloud Functions, Cloud Run images are stateless. However, unlike Cloud Functions, each container can handle up to 80 concurrent users, which can help reduce the frequency of cold starts.
Using Firebase Hosting with Cloud Run, we hope to empower you to build better web apps faster than ever before. Now your frontend and backend developers can truly use a single language, even share a code base. To get started right away, follow our step-by-step guide. Note that Cloud Run exists in the Google Cloud console rather than the Firebase console, but if you have a Firebase project then you already have a Google Cloud Platform project as well.
In this edition: Cloud Firestore, Flutter, search with Algolia, Phone Auth, and the brand new ML Kit!
Hey there, Firebase developers! The weather is really starting to warm up here in California as we approach summer, and if you're like me, it's the perfect time of year to go outside, find a nice shady tree, and cozy up with a programming project.
Ok, maybe some of you prefer going to the beach when it's nice out, but I can't seem to figure out how to keep the sand out of my computer! Anyway, when I'm feeling inspired to start a new project, I love having a tutorial to help out. Luckily, the Firebase community is creating new material all the time to keep me busy! If you're looking to find out more about a Firebase product, there's a good chance someone has tried it out and shared their experiences in a blog or video.
Since content can be scattered all over, I figured I'd do the work of scouring the Internet to bring you some of the best Firebase tutorials released over the past couple months. While I'd love to highlight every article and video about Firebase, there simply isn't time or space for them all, so I'm going to showcase a few that I'm most excited about.
Author: The Net Ninja
In this series, Shaun walks you step by step through incorporating Cloud Firestore into a simple web app. He starts with an intro to Cloud Firestore, and continues on through reading data, creating queries, writing data, and real-time updates. The illustrations really helped me visualize the content. The videos also include links to the code on GitHub.
Author: Tensor Programming
As the title suggests, this tutorial shows developers how to get users logged into your Flutter app with Firebase Authentication. This video picks up in the middle of a series, so you may want to go back to the beginning to learn about incorporating Cloud Firestore with Flutter. I've never worked with Dart before, but the instructor does such a great job of explaining each step, it was still very easy to follow along!
Author: Angular Firebase
The Angular Firebase channel creates a myriad of rich tutorials that use different features of Firebase. I'm highlighting this one in particular because so many developers want to know how to implement full text search in Firestore. I also like the use of Cloud Functions, especially the demonstration on how to hide secret API keys in environment variables. Even if you don't use Angular, you'll still learn a lot from this video. If you do use Angular, even better!
Don't want to choose between written and video tutorials?! Check out this Firebase Phone Authentication tutorial from Belal Khan, that also includes a video of the content. Khan's writing style includes larger blocks of code with explanations in between rather than adding and explaining line-by-line. This is great for those of you who like to learn by examining the code as a whole. I know when I'm learning a new feature, I like to look at a complete sample to see how the pieces fit together, so this was really cool to me.
Author: Anže Kravanja
I love this tutorial because, quite frankly, I know little about Google Analytics and nothing about Big Query. This is a great resource for developers who want to get more out of their data stored in Google Analytics for Firebase. The tutorial explains how sessions are tracked in Google Analytics for Firebase and demonstrates step by step how to group Firebase events into user sessions.
Adam Talcott looks at a couple of fun and useful cases for ML Kit for Firebase. As a fellow Swift developer, I love to see how other iOS folks are using Firebase.
I hope that these resources inspire you to build something great! I know after checking them out, I'm ready to slather on the sunblock and enjoy some UV rays while I code my next Firebase project!
Thanks to all of the developers who shared their knowledge with us through their tutorials! Firebase wouldn't be what it is without you. I'm going to feature tutorials here every couple of months, so when you find a tutorial you love, be sure to tell me about it! Find me on Twitter at @ThatJenPerson.
Today we're excited to launch Cloud Firestore, a fully-managed NoSQL document database for mobile and web app development. It's designed to easily store and sync app data at global scale, and it's now available in beta.
Key features of Cloud Firestore include:
And of course, we've aimed for the simplicity and ease-of-use that is always top priority for Firebase, while still making sure that Cloud Firestore can scale to power even the largest apps.
Managing app data is still hard; you have to scale servers, handle intermittent connectivity, and deliver data with low latency.
We've optimized Cloud Firestore for app development, so you can focus on delivering value to your users and shipping better apps, faster. Cloud Firestore:
As you may have guessed from the name, Cloud Firestore was built in close collaboration with the Google Cloud Platform team.
This means it's a fully managed product, built from the ground up to automatically scale. Cloud Firestore is a multi-region replicated database that ensures once data is committed, it's durable even in the face of unexpected disasters. Not only that, but despite being a distributed database, it's also strongly consistent, removing tricky edge cases to make building apps easier regardless of scale.
It also means that delivering a great server-side experience for backend developers is a top priority. We're launching SDKs for Java, Go, Python, and Node.js today, with more languages coming in the future.
Over the last 3 years Firebase has grown to become Google's app development platform; it now has 16 products to build and grow your app. If you've used Firebase before, you know we already offer a database, the Firebase Realtime Database, which helps with some of the challenges listed above.
The Firebase Realtime Database, with its client SDKs and real-time capabilities, is all about making app development faster and easier. Since its launch, it has been adopted by hundred of thousands of developers, and as its adoption grew, so did usage patterns. Developers began using the Realtime Database for more complex data and to build bigger apps, pushing the limits of the JSON data model and the performance of the database at scale. Cloud Firestore is inspired by what developers love most about the Firebase Realtime Database while also addressing its key limitations like data structuring, querying, and scaling.
So, if you're a Firebase Realtime Database user today, we think you'll love Cloud Firestore. However, this does not mean that Cloud Firestore is a drop-in replacement for the Firebase Realtime Database. For some use cases, it may make sense to use the Realtime Database to optimize for cost and latency, and it's also easy to use both databases together. You can read a more in-depth comparison between the two databases here.
We're continuing development on both databases and they'll both be available in our console and documentation.
Cloud Firestore enters public beta starting today. If you're comfortable using a beta product you should give it a spin on your next project! Here are some of the companies and startups who are already building with Cloud Firestore:
Get started by visiting the database tab in your Firebase console. For more details, see the documentation, pricing, code samples, performance limitations during beta, and view our open source iOS and JavaScript SDKs on GitHub.
We can't wait to see what you build and hear what you think of Cloud Firestore!
"We were early testers of Cloud Functions for Firebase and were excited to see how easy it was to extend the Realtime Database to export data and integrate with other services."- Erling Mårtensson, Master Architect, Sony
"Thanks to Cloud Functions for Firebase, I built a company with no permanent employees but myself (so far), with no serious scaling concerns, and no major costs maintaining or upgrading the backend as the app grows. It's something of a miracle." - Paul Budnitz, Founder/CEO, Wuu
Since expanding Firebase to become Google's mobile application development platform at Google I/O last year, our amazing community of developers has created over 1 million Firebase projects.
We're thrilled so many of you use and trust us. While Firebase is a full suite of products for building and growing apps, we know that some apps need more than we offer out-of-the-box. That's why we're bringing Firebase much closer to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to serve even the most demanding applications, whether you're a new startup or a large enterprise.
Firebase already shares the same account and billing system as GCP, so you can attach Firebase services to your GCP project and vice-versa. This makes for powerful combinations, such as exporting raw event data from Firebase Analytics into BigQuery for ad-hoc analysis. Starting today, we're beginning to share products too.
First, Firebase developers have been asking for ways to extend their app's functionality without spinning up a server, and Cloud Functions for Firebase lets you do just that. Cloud Functions is our new event-driven serverless compute offering that enters public beta today. The infrastructure is shared between Cloud and Firebase, allowing you to invoke a function or access resources from throughout the Cloud/Firebase ecosystem. For more information, read the announcement on the Firebase blog and Cloud blog.
Next, we're bringing Firebase Storage closer to Cloud Storage. Firebase Storage launched 10 months ago, and lets you easily upload and download files from your device directly to Cloud Storage. Previously we gave you a single bucket for your files. Now we're fully aligning the two products and letting you use any Cloud Storage bucket, from any global region and from any storage class, all straight from the Firebase SDK. To reflect this alignment we're renaming the product Cloud Storage for Firebase. Read more in our blog post.
Stay tuned for more product integrations in the future as Firebase continues to provide direct client-side access to GCP infrastructure through our iOS, Web, and Android SDKs.
We love lawyers almost as much as developers, so we're extending GCP's Terms of Service to cover several Firebase products. This makes Firebase and Cloud simpler to evaluate and use together. Products to be covered include: Authentication, Hosting, Storage, Functions, and Test Lab. Our streamlined Terms of Service will take effect soon.
Firebase brings together the best of Google on mobile -- whether that's Google's flagship advertising solutions like AdMob and AdWords, or Google's analytics expertise in the form of Firebase Analytics.
Google Cloud Platform lets you to benefit from the institutional knowledge Google has developed from almost two decades of running global-scale computing infrastructure.
By bringing together the ease-of-use of Firebase with the full-range of GCP infrastructure offerings, we're better able to serve you up and down the stack. If you're a startup using Firebase to quickly get to market, you can now easily scale into a full public cloud. If you're an existing business running on GCP who wants to ship a mobile app, we've got you covered too.
We can't wait to see what you build with Firebase and Google Cloud Platform!
