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When I last looked at Firebase, it seems like they bake auth into database so in this case a user is limited on what data they can read, like a select where uuid === uuid https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/security/user-secu.... And I assume non-authenticated read requests don't have access to everything...

It has this: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/security/rules-st...

Ah, interesting, so you basically put the server side validation code into the database. And nice, it can even handle authentication.

Cloud firestore supports placing rules on the database to prevent access by users that aren't authorized. You can independently control get, write, update, list, etc. The way the rules work can sometimes be irritating, in particular for list queries, but they do work.

In terms of rate limiting the only one I'm aware of is writes to a single record are rate limited. This impacts normal development when making counters that need to be updated, which leads to an odd "sharded counter" model.

Think of it as an API layer and database baked into one.