ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: Firebase
is Google's mobile and web app development platform
and it offers many useful cloud services.
So you might wonder, what is the relationship between Firebase
and Google Cloud Platform?
Stick around and I'll help you understand.
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You may know Firebase for all the features
it offers to enhance your client app,
such as authentication, analytics, crash reporting, AB
testing, or in-app messaging.
But Firebase also has several options
to manage data and business logic in the cloud
to help you build better apps.
This includes a No SQL database, server-less functions,
on device and server side machine learning
APIs, blob storage, and more.
Firebase is a wonderful way for Android
and web developers to leverage Google Cloud Services
without exposing them to all the knobs and dials of GCP.
In fact, when you create a Firebase project,
it is a GCP project in every aspect.
Resource grouping, identity management, and billing,
are all the same.
This gives you a great way to start using some cloud
services before you graduate into using GCP only
when you need to.
This is also important to any user
interested in building a mobile or web app on top
of an existing GCP infrastructure.
While the look and feel of the Firebase console and cloud
console are clearly different, you can open the same project
with either one.
If you'd like to open an existing GCP
project in the Firebase console to add Firebase-specific
functionality, simply select add a project
and click through the few setup steps.
Once done, all the Firebase APIs will be automatically enabled
in your project.
If you have an existing Firebase project,
simply head over to Cloud Console
and open it there with its identifier.
You should see and be able to manipulate
all of the project resources.
Finally, you want to be careful about deleting projects
as deleting a Firebase project deletes
the Google Cloud projects as well and all
its contained resources.
So now that you know that a Firebase project is also
GCP project, let's focus on the three main products
that Firebase and GCP have in common.
Cloud storage, a massively scalable blob storage system,
Cloud Functions, a server-less compute infrastructure
for event driven programming, and Cloud Firestore,
a massively scalable no SQL database.
These three GCP products can be used in Firebase
with additional mobile SDKs, as well as from the Firebase
CLI or command line interface.
We'll cover the first one now and the other two
in the next video.
So make sure you subscribe to this channel.
Cloud storage is a powerful, yet simple to use blob
storage system.
And if you have not heard of it, then you
should check out the short data and storage overview video link
below.
Cloud console exposes the full power of cloud storage
while the Firebase console exposes those features that
are most likely to be relevant to Firebase developers.
A typical use case for Firebase developers using cloud storage
is when managing user generated content.
This is where the Firebase Android, iOS, web, Unity,
and c++ SDKs, make it easy and yet secure to upload
and download objects such as images straight from the app.
Similarly to GCP projects using App Engine,
any new Firebase project comes with a default cloud storage
bucket.
In most cases, Firebase developers
also use this default storage location
and does not need to reference it by name.
Because of all the GCP and Firebase commonalities
this causes so far, any data stored in Cloud Storage
using Firebase can be further access
and processed in GCB and vise versa.
Imagine, for instance, a Firebase
powered mobile applications uploading pictures
to cloud storage.
It would be quite easy for a Cloud Scheduler initiate
a task to resize, crop, delete, or otherwise
manipulate all pictures in this default bucket.
You can also feed these files into other GCP big data
products such as BigQuery, data flow, or even into our machine
learning products.
One thing that you will want to note
is how bucket access control is different and orthogonal.
Cloud IAM is used to control access to buckets and objects
from GCP services.
On the other hand, Firebase security rules
control access only from mobile applications
that use the Firebase SDKs.
So there, you now know how data stored in Cloud Storage
can be equally accessed via a Firebase powered app
as well as you know from your GCP hosted applications.
In the next episode, we'll discuss the two remaining
products common to both platforms, Cloud Functions
and Cloud Firestore.
Same project and building infrastructure,
common cloud storage.
The two platforms have a lot in common
and were conceived to nicely complement one another.
It's time to get going with Firebase or GCP or both.
Thanks for watching this video.
Please like, subscribe, comment, share, and look forward
to more GCP Essentials videos.
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