GOOGLE FIREBASE PROS AND CONS

Pros and Cons of Firebase

Firebase became a popular type of Cloud Services. They enable entrepreneurs and businesses to create digital products without investing in building their backend infrastructure. Among available cloud-computing solutions, there is Firebase held by Google. The platform gained a lot of attention offering useful services that accelerate product development. Today we take a closer look at the pros and cons of Firebase and answer a question whether it’s an ultimate solution for your project. 

• What is Firebase?

Firebase is Google’s platform for web development that helps entrepreneurs build, improve, and scale their app products. The platform offers a set of tools that make the product development process a lot easier. That’s why it’s suitable for building an MVP as it shortens the time and effort put in by developers to actually create it. 

The ready-to-use services include Machine Learning Kit, Hosting, Storage functions, or Realtime Database. The infrastructure also offers some free products such as Analytics, Crash Reporting, or Cloud Messaging. The platform provides developers an API that allows app data to be synchronized across clients and stored on Firebase’s cloud.

Pros and Cons of Firebase 

To help you decide if the platform is worth your time and effort, we now evaluate its performance by comparing the pros and cons of Firebase.

Advantages

Disadvantages

If your app does run of a centralized DB, and is updated by a lot of users - then it's more than capable of handling the Real-Time data updates between devices. Stored in the cloud so readily available everywhere. Cross Platform API (If you are using this DB with an App) They Host the data. -Meaning if you are storing a lot of data, you don't have to worry about hardware!

Unless your app runs of one centralized database updated by a vast quantity of users, it's a major overkill. Storage format is entirely different to that of SQL, (Firebase uses JSON) so you wouldn't be able to migrate that easily. Reporting tools won't be anywhere near the ones of standard SQL. Costs! -Limited to 100 Connections and 1GB of Storage! (see this for more details on limitations!) You don't host the data, Firebase does. And depending on which server you get put on, viewing there up time there seems to be a lot of disruption lately.

What Is Firebase and Why Use It?

Firebase is a software development platform offered by Google. It helps to quickly build web applications without managing infrastructure. After giving the answer the pros and cons of using Firebase, let’s cover its best features. Basically, it consists of dozens of helpful services inside, including but not limited to:

•  Authentication — for sign up, sign in.

Firebase Authentication offers an array of methods of authentication such as email, password, and others. Firebase provides a comprehensive SDK tool including UI libraries to build a custom interface as well as open-source UIs that you use. 

•  Hosting — to serve your web app for users globally.

The platform also gives you access to a convenient hosting service for your static files. 

• Cloud Firestore — real-time database with a user-friendly admin dashboard.

The real-time database makes sure the application remains usable even in case of Internet connection loss. It stores and synchronizes data using a NoSQL database and updates information in real time. 

• Cloud Storage — suitable for storing media content like images, files.

Firebase Storage opens up an easy way of storing binary files like images directly from the user to Google Cloud Storage. 

• Cloud Functions — scalable solution to process data and virtually call any other actions.

Scalability has become very important, and Firebase makes sure that your code can stay the same from your first to your millionth user. It calculates the minimum necessary number of updates to keep your users in sync by using linear upscaling. 

But what is Firebase used for? The purpose of the platform is to provide a Backend-as-a-Software solution for mobile and web-based apps. BaaS helps developers build, test, and manage applications by eliminating backend databases.