Firebase App Hosting | Hacker News Reader

Firebase App Hosting

firebase.blog

55 pointsinlined26 comments

Christ some of the comments here are so cynical.

I’ve only skimmed the docs so far but I believe they offer a full turnkey no config required solution for 2 frameworks currently but like Cloud Run you can bring literally whatever you like here as a backend assuming you can get it into a container.

Looking over the feature set this honestly looks amazing and is ironically where most businesses want to ultimately get to (everything is integrated, security, performance, logging etc all just work, no resource wastage, proper separation of concerns etc).

Honestly this might actually be the best starting point going on the internet right now for many businesses.

ML has slightly reset the cloud game in terms of which vendors have proprietary models.

Where does it say anything about being your old backend? It just looks like another JS host like Vercel or Netlify?

Google historically hasn't been very strong in the cloud services area. In the places I've worked, I'm often the only advocate for (and only user of) GCloud offerings like Cloud Run or App Engine – which are IMO much easier to use than AWS offerings.

But then Vercel leapfrogged the legacy clouds just by white-labeling and packaging their individual offerings into a nice GUI, combining basic file hosting, a Node server, a CDN, serverless, KV, DB, etc... while simultaneously building up Next.js. These days it takes only like 3-5 minutes and like two clicks to deploy a new Next (or other framework) codebase to Vercel. It all "just works" too, and is free for dev projects and $20/mo for their basic paid plan (which is enough to build off of).

The cynicism is well-deserved, IMO, when Google is so late to this space (there are many companies doing this already), so quick to sunset everything, and seemingly completely preoccupied with AI these days. After the market failure of Angular, they seemed to stop caring about boring business web apps as anything more than a side thought. It's a very risky move to launch a startup on their stack.

That’s awesome as someone that builds NextJs fullstack.

I’ve really enjoyed using Firebase so far as the backend for my in-development chrome extension.

Using Firebase Auth, Cloud Functions, Hosting, Firestore, and the local emulator.

Now if I ever make a NextJs web app, I’d probably use Firebase app hosting

Be careful of vendor lock-in. Especially when it comes to Google.

That’s true, I’m also versed in Azure as a backup

The build process is open source, as are any adapters we use to help align vanilla code to best practices. Some stuff is magic (e.g. the FIREBASE_CONFIG env being automatically injected), but I’d hardly call that a risk of lock-in.

Are you a Google dev? I think I’m doing crazy things with chrome extensions, Firebase, and LLMs if you ever need a developer voice for these products.

Yes, I’m the engineering lead of Firebase App Hosting. If you have anything you want to talk about, inlined.dev has all the places you can find me.

Awesome stuff, I think it’s a super useful tool you’ve built and I’ll definitely be using it, in my next project most likely. I’ll check out those links :) cheers

Next week: sunsetting Firebase App Hosting

This seems like Google's version of Vercel, Netlify, AWS Amplify, Cloudflare Pages, etc. But especially Vercel, since they've expanded past basic Node hosting and integrated serverless workers, KV, Postgres, etc. – positioning them to be able to take on Firebase for some use cases.

I'm generally a fan of GCloud over AWS, but I don't see any advantage of this over Vercel. Vercel is way easier to use (as a dev) than anything I've seen in GCloud or Firebase. And them being behind Next.js means it's hard to find a better fit and feature parity (such as for automatic image optimizations) in other hosts... there's vendor lock-in, definitely, but with a much lower risk of overnight sunsetting.

This is a side project for Google that will probably disappear if/when it fails to pick up enough steam. For Vercel, this is their main line of business. Why should anyone choose Firebase?

Vercel has great products (both their hosting product and Next.js). If we look back far enough, some of Next.js’s most killer features (e.j. ISR) had tight coupling with their hosting platform. In the last year, Vercel has really upped their game. The Vercel-specific features are becoming encapsulated with replaceable delegates and Vercel has started differentiating with additional services. This is great! Vercel is innovating with new infrastructure (e.g. KV) while also increasing the portability of Next.js applications. We (Firebase) are going to use these more portable APIs to offer similar experiences and Google, Vercel, and others will differentiate on their IaaS ecosystem. This benefits developers immensely because it eliminates lock-in fears because Next.js will have proof of portability in market and you no longer have to couple your infrastructure and framework decision making. It’s a bright future for web developers in general!

Serious question: does anyone start new projects these days using angular?

Absolutely, it’s a fantastic choice. I’ve found getting started up with it to be much faster than similar React/Vue sites, I can rely on most features being pretty battle tested when they get into Angular, performance improvements continue being implemented and there’s less variability between Angular projects compared to other frameworks. YMMV however depending on teams and projects.

How has it been trying to find Angular devs and online resources (Q&A, etc.?)

I loved AngularJS v1 when it first came out. The Angular 2+ learning curve was high and React seemed to just leapfrog over it and explode in popularity. In the last five years or so, I've only seen one Angular codebase and it was really hard to troubleshoot it due to the lack of easily available "me too" questions online. I haven't heard it discussed at all in a good decade or so now; even if the code is good, it seems like the mindshare is completely gone, at least in my circles?

Great questions. Anecdotally it feels like there’s been an increase in online references, though maybe not comparable to other frameworks. It’s still more than it was.

As for finding developers we haven’t had too many problems. There’s been a good amount of great, startup minded engineers who did angular at big enterprises and want something smaller. Less than react devs by a lot, but overall the quality on average was higher.

Which happens first: they accidentally delete your account or they close down the product?

They voluntarily shut down your and your wive’s personal and business accounts because six years ago you logged in on a computer on some former client’s premises and one of their former one-off contractors got banned for doing some shady stuff two weeks ago on Google Play for yet another third-party you’ve never even heard of.

I’m barely making this up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390833

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33737577

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34961069

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30823872

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30851659

So Vercel but for Firebase

App Engine: Redux

Is this the inverse of Vercel + Supabase?

Legendary Google customer service

Support for just two specific js frameworks? Meh

Any node app works if you have a build and start script. Being a “supported” framework is a lot more about forward looking commitments that we’ll understand your site’s configuration and translate it to our native output rather than asking you to do it “our way” (e.g. redirects that never have to hit your backend)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com