Cloud Firestore—a flexible, scalable database for mobile, web, and server development from Firebase and Google Cloud—offers a variety of benefits for its developers, from flexible, hierarchical data structures to expressive querying and real-time updates. Now, Firestore developers can leverage MongoDB's API portability in conjunction with Firestore's differentiated serverless service, unlocking even more value.
Minh Nguyen, senior product manager, Google Cloud, and Patrick Costello, engineering manager, Google Cloud, joined DBTA’s webinar, Hands On: Firestore With MongoDB Compatibility in Action, to walk viewers through the wide array of advantages offered by Firestore with MongoDB compatibility, including multi-region replication with strong consistency, virtually unlimited scalability, high availability of up to 99.999% SLA, and single-digit milliseconds read performance.
To begin, Nguyen provided a brief overview of Firestore, Google’s cloud-first, serverless document database.
As “an enterprise-ready document database that allows you to build rich applications for your users,” said Nguyen, Firestore offers an advanced query engine with more than 120 capabilities supporting JSON data types; strongly consistent reads and ACID transactions; integrations with GCP governance; broad support for SDKs, drivers, and tools in more than 17 programming languages; batch and live-streaming migration; simple, cost-effective pricing based on the traffic you incur; and more.
Now, with MongoDB compatibility, Firestore helps “bring the database to your developers,” explained Nguyen. This integration enables developers to utilize their existing MongoDB app code, drivers, and tools directly within Firestore, benefitting from Firestore’s scalability and availability—with no code changes.
Data interoperability, where users can leverage Firestore and Datastore SDKs alongside MongoDB drivers, is coming later this year. According to Nguyen, “This enables developers to get started on Firestore with MongoDB compatibility, but then, furthermore, take advantage of Firestore’s innovative, real-time and offline caching SDKs.”
“Firestore brings together multiple, popular developer communities into one system,” emphasized Nguyen. “Firestore supports MongoDB tools, Google Cloud service integrations, and Firebase service integrations…allowing you to maximize these ecosystems.”
Firestore with MongoDB compatibility also delivers on security and compliance, offering features such as:
- Data encryption with Customer Managed Encryption Key (CMEK)
- IAM authentication and authorization
- Cloud Audit Logging for compliance
- Cloud Monitoring for insights and alerts
- Disaster recovery strategies ranging from backups to comprehensive options to ensure operational resilience
- Database Center, a unified view for Firestore fleet management with AI-powered optimization
- Firestore Query Explain, which provides query plan analysis
- Firestore Query Insights, which identifies and resolves query performance issues with detailed diagnostics
Following Nguyen’s overview, Costello offered more detailed explanations of how Firestore works “under the hood,” further aided by live demos of the product.
This is only a snippet of the full Hands On: Firestore With MongoDB Compatibility in Action webinar. For the full webinar, featuring more detailed explanations, demos, a Q&A, and more, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.