Images taken from firebase.google.com/ Google's Firebase service at firebase.google.com/ allows application developers to quickly and easily integrate a data service into their apps without worrying about managing any of the infrastructure involved with traditional solutions such as MySQL database servers and a related backend solution.
Firebase makes this a breeze by providing a simple and easy to use way of managing your data from its cloud service. Connecting to this data is also made quite simple by the easy to follow setup guides for a number of common uses: webapps, Android apps and iOS apps. While these are the main platforms intended for use with Firebase, it is possible to connect other languages but a little more knowledge may be required on the part of the developer. Firebase is not only a database solution, it also offers services such as authentication, analytics, file storage, predictive technology, advertising, cloud messaging and more. In the context of this series of posts, however, I will be focusing on the database service and may touch on the authentication service briefly. Google offers Firebase as a three tiered service - a free plan called Spark, a fixed price plan called Flame and a pay as you go plan called Blaze. Comparing the plans, there is good value offered but I will be focusing on the free plan since most developers will, of course, be testing the services offered before committing to any expense. The free Spark plan is available to anyone with Google account and it offers a generous 10GB/month of data transfer along with 1GB of storage and 100 simultaneous connections. This would be plenty of data for a small, well designed application with a modest user base. Of course, if your app becomes successful enough and you need to support up to 100,000 connections , the $25/month upgrade to the Flame plan may not be too much of an issue. If your needs exceed this, the pay as you go Blaze plan may also be required but at this point, it may be worth considering different options from other providers for certain services, or even a custom backend solution. While the storage is generally quite small, a well developed app would not need such storage and it is always worth looking at other options. For example, if you need to store a lot of images, it may be worth thinking about storing and retrieving these images from another provider. In the case of a non-critical, personal or fun application, imgur.com may be enough for your needs, although reliability may be an issue from time to time. In the next post in this series, I will be looking at actually getting access to Firebase from a Google account and then creating a small database from some existing JSON data.
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2nd Year B.Sc. Software Development Archives
December 2017
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