Last year, USV invested in Firebase. Albert wrote a blog post about Firebase back when we invested.
Yesterday Firebase announced a hosted version of their product so you don’t have to use it alongside S3 or some other host.
I wandered by Hacker News to see what the developer crowd thought about Firebase and the new hosting service and was pleasantly surprised to see one of the most positive threads on Hacker News that I have seen in a long time.
The top voted comment describes the power of Firebase really well:
I’ve been using Firebase for a couple of months now for an iOS app I’m building for a client, and it has been a fantastic experience.
For anyone who doesn’t know, it’s main selling point is that it automatically syncs with the server so you can focus on the data instead of the communication protocol or replication. Its nosql data store looks like a local filesystem, so you can save trees of data to it as JSON. It also has server-side rules written in javascript that enforce constraints on data and read/write permissions per user. They also have a free test account for developers.
“What about merge conflicts?” was my first question, but luckily it has transactions on an individual node (and its subtree) that perform an “optimistic-concurrency transactional update” which basically means a compare-and-swap where you review the current value in a callback and decide whether to try to commit that value (or a new value, say, for a counter) or give up. For most other writes, you’re usually just saving status updates where there is little or no danger of being rejected or encountering merge conflicts. If in doubt, it’s possible to get a callback with the final value.
So when it’s all said and done, I can totally see writing a full-featured app using it without a single line of server-side code. I used their hosting while it was in development to store images (like a CDN) and it’s very simple to use from the console, so if you have a build script, it could push to production with a single call. After an exhausting ordeal battling iCloud for a different project, Firebase is so profoundly better that I will never go back.
That’s the kind of unsolicited customer testimonial that most companies would die for. It’s a real tribute to the Firebase team that they have built something that developers love. We have been involved with a few companies that make products developers love (Stack, Twilio, Mongo for example) and these have all been fantastic investments for us. Looks like its time to add Firebase to that list.
