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NATALIE VAIS: Let's say you want to build an app.
Not just any app, but a serverless, scalable,
mobile-thinking, analytical IoT app.
If you do a quick Google search, you
will get 1.2 billion results on how to do this.
So where do you start?
My name is Natalie Vais, and I'm a Product Manager
on Cloud Firestore.
Today, I want to talk to you about building amazing apps,
specifically, how to build globally
scalable apps with Cloud Firestore.
If you're starting a new project from scratch,
and you want to build it yourself,
you'll likely have to think about a couple of things--
number one, setting up a database, number two,
creating some kind of API layer on top of it so you can make
queries from your clients.
And that probably means, third, creating an authentication
service to make sure users can only access
data they're supposed to.
And then lastly, making sure your data
syncs with your local results which
are probably being stored in a completely separate client
database.
Now, just make sure it works across multiple platforms.
It can easily handle things like spotty network connections.
Simple, right?
As soon as your app goes viral--
fingers crossed for you--
all of a sudden, you have to worry
about scaling, high availability, and disaster
recovery strategies.
And you'll probably need to hire more people to manage it, too.
Or you can just use Cloud Firestore.
Cloud Firestore is a fully managed,
serverless, NoSQL document database purpose-built
for solving some of the toughest problems of mobile web and IoT
app development today.
In many ways, it's more than a database.
It's an entire back end for your apps.
To create Firestore, we learned from two
other popular databases at Google--
Firebase Realtime Database and Cloud Datastore--
usage patterns have shifted since those architectures
were designed some 7 to 10 years ago, respectively.
So we took a close look at the developer wish
list for each of these to inform the products.
You can think of Firestore as the best
of both of these worlds.
Cloud Firestore handles all the things
that you don't want to think about when you're developing
a mobile app, so you can really focus on your core business.
The first thing to know is that Cloud Firestore is fully
supported in the Firebase SDKs.
This includes web, iOS, and Android,
so you can access data directly from these clients.
This works in conjunction with Firebase Auth and Security
Rules.
And those things allow you to control
who has access to read and modify data on the server.
There's that Auth layer we mentioned at the beginning.
You wouldn't believe how normal it has become for people
to look at their apps when there is absolutely
no chance of connectivity.
A person checks their phone an average of 80 times in a day,
so it's becoming increasingly common for people
to expect our apps to work offline and across devices.
With Cloud Firestore, the client libraries
already come with full support for offline mode.
The SDK handles conflict resolution on-device
and syncs up with the server when you reconnect.
Because we built Cloud Firestore with a serverless architecture,
you don't have to worry about provisioning, capacity
planning, scaling, or maintenance.
There are servers distributed across the world,
just not ones that you have to manage.
All of this is taken care of by the system.
Scaling is automatic and happens as an online operation.
Say goodbye to maintenance windows.
On top of that, Cloud Firestore is built for the Cloud.
That means it's replicated across zones and regions
depending on how you choose to configure it.
In this year alone, and as part of going generally available,
we added 10 new locations to Cloud Firestore.
Replication across data centers is really
one of those things you want to outsource if you can.
It becomes complicated quickly and has
a huge overhead for ops teams.
With this replication, you get five nines
SLA for multi-region and a four nines
SLA for regional deployments.
This is one of the highest availability services we offer.
All of this lets you focus on your core business
and leaves the infrastructure to Google Cloud,
which is our core business.
With over 1 million databases created already,
Cloud Firestore has seen a huge diversity
of workloads already deployed within our customer base.
The unifying themes among these workloads include--
number one, the need for data access
even when connectivity lapses; number two,
scalability for many users across platforms;
and number three, the ability to move quickly
from prototype to production.
And that's Cloud Firestore-- your auto-syncing, auto-scaling
database in the Cloud.
Give it a try, and find out why it's the most discussed cloud
database on Stack Overflow.
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