Not the person you responded to, but I just joined somewhere new and it's clear Firebase was the biggest mistake / is the biggest source of technical debt. It was helpful for bootstrapping 6 years ago, but now it stands out as the worst part of our tech stack. For our small shop, we will not be able to migrate any time soon.
- Most frustrating are the outages we have no control over. It seems like every other day, the server running our firebase instance mysteriously disappears from the internet. We can ping `my-app.fibaseio.com` but receive no events from it. This lasts anywhere from 5 to 25 minutes. Usually there is no blip in the firebase status page. The main devs have given up trying to debug it.
- We are nearing the resource limits of the paid plan for a single realtime database. We're working on splitting our one database into a master and sharding what we can.
- The particular eventual consistency and transaction semantics require workarounds everywhere. If you want an atomic transaction, you have to perform it on some common parent, but you are also encouraged to keep your data model flat and normalize as much as possible. Our integration test suite is tiny and horrendously slow because we cannot rely on Firebase to be timely, so there are huge timeouts everywhere that regularly take ages. Every past attempt at tuning the timeouts to be shorter eventually causes spurious failures a week later.
- Unless your data closely models the kind of chat application Firebase was built around, you end up needing a real database eventually. Not just to perform real queries with joins and complex logic, but also to essentially maintain indices that anemic mobile clients can use because the firebase filtered query semantics are limited to a single key. Now you need some kind of daemon to shuffle data in and out of your real database. Unfortunately, your real database is missing tons of foreign key constraints because that's the easiest way to handle firebase's eventual consistency.
That's just my take a month after joining somewhere intimately coupled to firebase.
It's a combination of a lack of developer bandwidth, fatigue, and typical difficult google customer service. Previously it was just a sole backend developer who also did the server operations/SRE type stuff plus a couple front end web developers. To them, it quickly became just a fact of life after repeatedly failing to find a solution. The customer service people don't like that, because these short down times always happen during standard business hours (only time our service is ever used). Complaints about disrupted sales pitches or customer demos go ignored.
I'm joining as the second backend developer, so maybe while I'm still green and have the naive bravery, I will go give it another shot next time it happens. I don't know much about advanced networking, but we suspect there's some kind of partition happening frequently between our servers and our production firebase instance. Uncertain how to debug that and how to work around it. It usually affects all of our servers, which are located in a single data center. I suppose next time I will try to track down and inspect the socket being used by the firebase SDK, but I don't really know what to be looking for at that point.
Mostly database-related issues as far as I understand. What I’m wondering is: is it related to Firebase only or more would it apply more generally to any NoSQL databases provider?
So I've been using it in production for about 4 years. I still have a couple of projects there, unfortunately.
Firebase lets you grow super easily at first but the bigger your project the more of a problem it becomes in terms of development.
The biggest problem is that databases are extremely inadequate for anything that goes beyond prototypes or very simple uses cases. There are no relations, very basic querying / filtering, no ACID, etc. your logic to interact with the databases becomes super tedious. Fauna is by far a much better serverless DB.
There is huge vendor lock in and their client libraries are huge. The JS library is like 200kB minified and gzipped. You can in principle use REST to interact with the backend but you lose most interesting features (realtime, sync, etc).
Cloud Functions are extremely tedious to work with. Most of your functions cannot be tested locally and they take forever to upload. Sometimes even minutes. Sometimes deploy gets stuck and don't you dare cancel the upload otherwise it will take more time to be able to upload again. With Cloudflare Workers you can do all in local dev and deploy takes seconds. With Zeit Now you can also make all dev locally.
The Firebase Console is a huge piece of bloated JS made in Angular 1 IIRC. It's also very basic as far as functionality goes.
Firebase hosting is good. Nothing to complain but all other options are equally great (Netlify, Zeit, Cloudflare Workers Sites, etc).
Not positive if it's still an issue or not but they had a Geopoint type in Firestore but I incorrectly assumed you'd be able to do geo searches because of that. Their proposed solution was to pipe the Firestore docs to Algolia indexes and use their service. I did that and I love Algolia but don't assume anything because it's Google.
