Google Cloud has announced the general availability of Cloud Firestore, a serverless, NoSQL document database, which is available in 10 new locations to complement the existing three, with a significant price reduction for regional instances, and enabling integration with Stackdriver for monitoring.
The news was shared by Amit Ganesh, VP, engineering, Google Cloud; and Dan McGrath, product manager, Google Cloud, in a joint blog post.
According to Ganesh and McGrath, Cloud Firestore is a cloud-native database that makes it simple to store, sync, and query data for web, mobile, and IoT applications. Cloud Firestore is integrated with both the Google Cloud Platform and Firebase, Google’s mobile development platform.
As the next generation of Cloud Datastore, Cloud Firestore is compatible with all Cloud Datastore APIs and client libraries. Existing Cloud Datastore users will be live-upgraded to Cloud Firestore automatically later in 2019.
Going beyond core database tasks, Ganesh and McGrath write that it is designed to be a complete data back-end that handles security and authorization, infrastructure, edge data storage, and synchronization. “Identity and access management (IAM) and Firebase Auth are built in to help make sure your application and its data remain secure. Tight integration with Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, and Firebase’s SDK accelerates and simplifies building end-to-end serverless applications. You can also easily export data into BigQuery for powerful analysis, post-processing of data, and machine learning.”
According to Ganesh and McGrath , “Building with Cloud Firestore means your app can seamlessly transition from online to offline and back at the edge of connectivity. This helps lead to simpler code and fewer errors. You can serve rich user experiences and push data updates to more than a million concurrent clients, all without having to set up and maintain infrastructure. Cloud Firestore’s strong consistency guarantee helps to minimize application code complexity and reduces bugs. A client-side application can even talk directly to the database, because enterprise-grade security is built right in. Unlike most other NoSQL databases, Cloud Firestore supports modifying up to 500 collections and documents in a single transaction while still automatically scaling to exactly match your workload.”
More information is available from Google Cloud about Cloud Firestore.