The Google Firebase team is launching the public beta of Cloud Firestore today. Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL document database solution for mobile and web app development built in collaboration with the Google Cloud Platform team.
SDKs for Cloud Firestore are available for iOS, Android and web development, allowing developers to integrate a powerful querying tool, real-time data synchronization, automatic, multi-region data replication and server SDKs for Node, Python, Go and Java.
“Managing app data is still hard; you have to scale servers, handle intermittent connectivity, and deliver data with low latency,” Alex Dufetel, product manager for Firebase, wrote on the company’s development blog. “We’ve optimized Cloud Firestore for app development, so you can focus on delivering value to your users and shipping better apps, faster.”
Cloud Firestore is designed for extensive scalability and data synchronization across any number of users, including the use of client-side storage and serverless security rules in the case of limited connectivity or offline use.
“Cloud Firestore is a multi-region replicated database that ensures once data is committed, it’s durable even in the face of unexpected disasters,” Dufetel wrote. “Not only that, but despite being a distributed database, it’s also strongly consistent, removing tricky edge cases to make building apps easier regardless of scale.”
The company says that Cloud Firestore is meant to address some of the limitations of Firebase’s existing database solution, Firebase Realtime Database, such as data structuring, querying and scaling challenges. Though for the time being, both databases will be supported.
