WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GOOGLE CLOUD AND FIREBASE?

If you are a mobile developer, you definitely know what firebase is. For those of you who have no clue as to what is firebase, I will give you a brief intro on this subject. So, basically firebase is Google’s mobile application development platform. If you are an enterprise systems developer, there’s a good chance that you might know something about Google Cloud Platform or GCP. GCP is a broad suite of products and services that host your data and code at planetary scale. While both of these platforms can be used without the knowledge of the other, there are some particular ways in which they might overlap. Knowledge of this relationship is important in two circumstances:

Case 1: You are a firebase app developer and you need to expand your backend infrastructure beyond the default space provided by firebase.

Case2: You are a Google cloud developer and you want to develop a mobile (or web) on top of your existing infrastructure in Google Cloud Computing.

Even if you have nothing to do with these two platforms, you should still be in possession of the knowledge that goes with these.

So, let’s dive right into the topic without further ado.

A FIREBASE PROJECT CAN ALSO BE CALLED A GCP PROJECT:

While you are creating a firebase project, this fact is mostly hidden. While getting started with firebase it’s not crucial for you to know anything about GCP. The onboarding path has been aligned and optimized in such an efficient manner that for getting a working solution you need to put in very little work. This attribute of firebase is commended by many app developers.

This is what firebase console looks like when you have created a new project:

There is a list present on the left which can be scrolled. This list is organized by top-level category that can be expanded and collided. There are some buttons present in the middle that help you get started adding your app to the project. Once you have added your app to the project and start using some of the products, the main area changes into a dashboard that shows you some stats on the products that you are using.

In contrast to this, here is a snapshot of a new project created on Google Cloud console:

The look, the feel literally everything is completely different in the two. Just like the firebase, GCM also has the option where you can scroll to see all the products. GCP products are a virtual container for the data, code, configuration and services regardless of how it was created. While you are creating a firebase project, what you are doing is creating a GCP project in the back end.

In some of the cases, in order to handle some of the common tasks such as, billing management and administrative management firebase console actually delegates to the cloud console. So, while you’re working with firebase console and you see a blue and white icon and press on that, then you have been sent to the Google cloud console.

There is a very important thing that you should know about these project containers. Since the underlying project is the same for both, GCP as well as firebase so, if you try deleting either through the cloud or through firebase, you will be deleting everything in that container (no matter where the project was configured). So, if you created a project on the firebase console and added it to cloud and then delete the cloud configuration, then everything that was in the project will be deleted.

FIREBASE ADDS SDKS, TOOLS AND CONFIGURATIONS TO SOME GOOGLE CLOUD PRODUCTS.

While working on firebase you have the neck over working with GCP as some of the additional features that are included in GCP can also be accessed through firebase. You can guess right from the name of the features like cloud storage, cloud firestones and cloud functions that they are google cloud products.

• Cloud Storage a massively scalable file storage system.
• Cloud Firestore is a massively scalable realtime NoSQL database.
• Cloud Functions provides serverless compute infrastructure for event driven programming

Folks, that is all for this blog. I hope that I was able to explain to you the concepts of firebase and Google console products, the differences amongst the two as well as advantages of using firebase.

Thank you for reading this blog so far!! If you have any doubts or queries regarding this topic, feel free to reach out.

I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day :))