Hacker News Reader

Comment by EZ-E | Hacker News Reader

Having heavily used Firebase Realtime Database (firestore's ancestor), I think I will approach this one very carefully. Firebase Realtime Database was a nightmare with frequent downtime, sometimes minutes, occasionally an hour. Also almost weekly, all clients sometimes wouldn't get notified of document changes which was crippling for our app.

View on HN

Firebase Realtime was basically a Mysql instance which Google ended up with when they bought the Firebase ecosystem. Not scaleable at all. You see hints about this in some places when they talk about using it in production. I am sure some Google engineer went nuts when he saw what they have to support now.

Firestore is a complete engineered Google solution based on the Google Datastore but with added features from recent years (spanner, cloud functions). This is very obvious if you compare the limits between Datastore and Firestore.

IMHO they are not really comparable.

Hi EZ-E - completely understand the concern. Cloud Firestore's architecture is very different and engineered to be an extremely highly available system backed by a 5 nines SLA. It has no scheduled downtime either.

I've been using cloud firestore for 6 months now and haven't had an issue with it. Designing around their rules system has been annoying, and the lack of backups bit me once pretty hard (I built https://firesafe.app as a result), but other than that it's been great.

I think one of the requirements for Firestore going GA was getting a b̶a̶c̶k̶u̶p̶ managed export system:

https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/manage-data/expor...

Edit: As wsh91 says below, you are still responsible for the scheduling.

(I work for GCP)

right, but didn't see anything mentioned about backup in the link. or am i missing anything?

An export is one component of a backup solution. :) Scheduling is another (https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/solutions/schedul...). (Checking restores is critical, too; that's also feasible [managed import into a new cloud project] but requires a bit more legwork.)

(I work on Cloud Firestore.)

FWIW, I'd love it if you made my app unnecessary. You can consider my site a list of feature requests :)

Oh wow!

I am just using this https://github.com/ChristianAlexander/FirestoreRestore with cloud functions & cloud storage.

We once had a 13 hours downtime on our main product. It wasn't a fun day.

We decided to move out of the Firebase RTDB because not only we weren't happy about it but it was unreliable.

We still use it's static hosting and cloud functions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com