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Comment by brendanlim | Hacker News Reader

(Cloud Functions for Firebase PM here)

We’ve been developing this product for years, and we’ve had it in private alpha testing for well over a year, so we’re incredibly excited to finally take the wrappings off and let all of you try it.

Firebase has always focused on empowering you all to build extraordinary experiences for your users, without needing to worry about building common infrastructure. While we’ve made big strides towards this vision in the past, we always had one big hole: trusted code execution. Today, we’re completing the story with Cloud Functions for Firebase so that you can easily run server-side code in response to events from your Firebase app.

We think you’re going to love it, and we can’t wait to see what you build with it!

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Brendan, this is exciting news for lots of people! I'm developing a product on Firebase now and trusted code execution has always been my biggest concern.

Sure, it could be mitigated, but all the workarounds added unnecessary overhead and breaking points.

Want to thank you and your team for working on this. Firebase is a great product and this will make it just fantastic.

One thing if I have your ear - I'd love to give Firebase team some money by purchasing paid support - ideally as a part of the new Google Cloud support options announced yesterday. I hope this is on your roadmap as well :-)

From an onboarding and testing perspective, it would be nice to be able to integrate other services ("Outbound networking"?) in the free tier. Maybe limit to one connection?

There's a bit of a nuance here. Even if you join the Blaze plan (pay as you go) there's still a large free quota. The quota is actually much larger than you get with Spark as well. We just can't allow arbitrary REST calls without a credit card. This helps avoid Cloud Functions being used for abuse/malware.

Any estimation when, if at all, European individuals can use the paid version of Firebase (Functions)?

Are there plans to allow functions written in other languages than javascript?

Cloud Functions for Firebase tech lead here. We'll get there in the future. We're looking forward to getting more feedback from users & prioritizing what is next.

Do you plan to introduce something similar to AWS step machines?

step functions

Thanks, this was the only thing holding me back from Firebase.

same

I can't tell from the docs - are server functions able to to modify or reject writes to refs in the realtime DB before they happen?

No. All events are asynchronous. This use case is best simulated by having clients post to a queue. Cloud functions then either discards or applies writes in that queue.

You should add this technique to the docs! It makes you realize that the Cloud Functions feature is a lot more powerful than you might initially think.

A lot of people use the Firebase Queue library for this:
https://github.com/firebase/firebase-queue

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