News

Google Launches Cloud Firestore, a Serverless NoSQL Database

• By David Ramel
• January 31, 2019

Google today announced the general availability of its Cloud Firestore NoSQL document database for the growing serverless computing space where there's no need to manage infrastructure.

The new managed, cloud-native database is integrated both with the company's Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and its mobile development platform called Firebase. In fact, when introduced back in October 2017, Cloud Firestore was described as a complementary product for Firebase.

Since then, Google has tuned and optimized the data store, which it characterizes as more than just another NoSQL document database.

"Cloud Firestore does more than just core database tasks," Google said in a blog post today (Jan. 31). "It’s designed to be a complete data backend that handles security and authorization, infrastructure, edge data storage, and synchronization. Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Firebase Auth are built in to help make sure your application and its data remain secure."

At the time of that October 2017 debut, Google said key features of Cloud Firestore included:

• Documents and collections with powerful querying
• iOS, Android, and Web SDKs with offline data access
• Real-time data synchronization
• Automatic, multi-region data replication with strong consistency
• Node, Python, Go, and Java server SDKs

Those capabilities have of course been expanded greatly since then (there's now a JavaScript SDK, for one minor example), but Google listed little new functionality specific to the new general availability edition. It did mention beta Stackdriver integration that allows users to monitor Cloud Firestore read, write and delete operations in near-real time with the company's cloud computing systems management service.

Otherwise, the blog post's "what's new" section mainly lists new pricing, a service-level agreement (SLA) and new locations where Firestore is available.

Since the beta launch, Google said, nearly 1 million Cloud Firestore databases have been created. It offered the following graphic that shows the number of Stack Overflow questions about various cloud databases as proof of the interest in the project.

Going forward, the company said, "We're working on adding some of the most requested features to Cloud Firestore from our developer community, such as querying for documents across collections and incrementing database values without needing a transaction."

Developers interested in learning more can avail themselves of the following resources:

• Cloud Firestore Quickstart
• Cloud Firestore APIs
• Cloud Firestore Samples