State of Firebase (mid 2019)

💬 Cloud Next & Google I/O 2019 updates!

Google Cloud Next 19 and Google I/O 19 were jam packed this year! This list should get you up to speed with all that’s new with Firebase so far in 2019!

Dashboard

• IAM supported project access: manage access using GCP IAM with predefined and custom roles.
• BigQuery data export: Analytics, Cloud Messaging, Crashlytics, Performance Monitoring and Predictions data export to BQ.
• Enterprise support: robust paid-support for enterprise customers. Free Community Support is still available.

Authentication

• iOS GameCenter, Yahoo, Microsoft identity providers!
• Unity and C++ Google Play Games Services authentication!
• Service Workers session management: simplify your flows for token management, token refreshing and client/server token synchronisation.
• Email Action Links: enables custom email templates for password reset, email-based sign-in and email address verification.
• Cross-account protection events: Google sign-in JWTs will now contain event information regarding account abuse or risky behaviour. You can then act on this information by forcing re-authentication etc. See this video for more information.
• Multi-Factor Authentication with SMS on Firebase Authentication: Teased at Google I/O (not yet available), see this video for more information.

📚 Documentation

Cloud Firestore

• Generally Available & HIPAA compliant. SLAs for regional (99.99%) and multi-regional (99.999%) databases.
• Atomic value increments: increment or decrement a value by an integer amount without the hassle of writing a transaction.
• Collection Group Queries: search fields across all collections of the same name. Eg: songs regardless of which artist produced them!

source: Firebase Blog

📚 Documentation

Cloud Functions

• Cloud Functions Emulator: for easier local app dev & testing with Cloud Firestore emulator integration to enable DB triggered function testing.
• Scheduled (Cron) Cloud Functions: see my post on this specific details.
• Blocking (Synchronous) Functions: Teased at Google I/O (not yet available) these functions will trigger during the Authentication flows. beforeCreate() and beforeSignIn() will both stop the auth flow until they return. As an example, these functions will allow you to perform tasks like check a user’s email is on an allowed list and inject appropriate customClaims. See this video for more information.

📚 Documentation

Firebase Performance Monitoring

• Web App support: metrics for page loads (First paint, contentful paint, input delay etc), browser types, country of access, connection types (3G, 4G etc) and more!

📚 Documentation

Firebase Hosting

• Cloud Run rewrites: as with Cloud Functions, you can use a Cloud Run service to produce dynamic content on demand for particular routes!
• *.web.app domains: free domain in addition to the existing free *.firebaseapp.com domain.

📚 Documentation

MLKit

• Language Identification: on-device language identification API, you can determine the language of a string of text.
• Smart Reply: generate relevant replies to messages.
• On-device Translation: dynamically translate text between 59 languages.
• Object Detection & Tracking: locate and track, in real-time, the most prominent object in a live camera feed.
• AutoML Vision Edge: easily create custom image classification models.

📚 Documentation

Analytics

• Multi-property filtering: filter event reports by multiple properties in addition to custom properties.
• Audience Builder: supports time windows, membership duration, sequences, scopes and more.

📚 Documentation

Crashlytics

• Unity is now a supported platform!

📚 Documentation

Open Source & Community

• C++ SDK is now open sourced
• StackBlitz has partnered with Google to provide one-click Firebase deployments from an online IDE.
• FireSQL: Query Firestore using SQL syntax.
• VSCode Firebase Explorer: Explore and manage your Firebase projects from within your editor!
• Firepit — standalone, portable version of the Firebase CLI which has no depedencies (including Node.js). Works on Windows!

Sourced from Awesome Firebase 🔥

Conclusion

An amazing start to the year by the Firebase team! I am excited to give these features a go (especially the Synchronous Functions) and can’t wait to see what awesome features come by Firebase Summit 2019!

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Sources

📹 Firebase @ Google IO ‘19
📔 Firebase Blog: Cloud Next 2019 & Google I/O 2019

Need something else to read?

📑 Table of Contents
An index post for my Medium Series

💻 Berglas with Node.js on Cloud Run
Runtime Secret Decryption with Golang & Node.js

💬 The 3 best features of Google Cloud Run
King of Serverless Compute?

💬 The State of Cloud Functions (mid 19)
Google Next 19 in a Nutshell

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