UPDATED 13:46 EDT / MARCH 09 2017

CLOUD

Google beefs up Firebase to bring mobile development closer to the cloud

Google Inc. announced more cloud-based capabilities for its mobile and web application development framework Firebase today during the Cloud Next conference in San Francisco.

According to the company, the platform will be getting new software development kit functions to offer a complete back-end serverless solution and the re-introduction of Firebase Storage rebranded as Cloud Storage for Firebase.

Mobile and web application developers use Firebase to build data usage directly into apps without the need for expensive centralized operations, all powered by Google. At its core, the platform provides an analytics suite and a set of tools for hosting web content, storing and synching data, authentication and communication.

Following the most popular requests from developers, Google is extending the Firebase software development kit to include Cloud Functions for Firebase. This new SDK functionality for Firebase enters public beta today.

With this new functionality, developers will gain access to Cloud Functions, a new event-driven serverless compute infrastructure going into beta today. With this functionality, the Firebase SDK can take advantage of the Google Cloud Platform like never before, giving developers greater freedom to build apps that do not need to rely on a server farm or centralized infrastructure.

“Fireball integration is something people have been looking forward to for a long time,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research.

Google is also putting Cloud Storage directly into the hands of Firebase developers with Cloud Storage for Firebase. With this, the company is expanding Firebase Storage, launched 10 months ago, to encompass the full range of cloud storage for data uploads and downloads from mobile apps.

Developers using the updated cloud storage service may now use any Cloud Storage bucket, from any global region and from any storage class directly from within the Firebase SDK.

In the announcement, Google also mentioned plans to integrate Firebase further with other Google Cloud products, providing tighter incorporation of cloud services and GCP infrastructure through web, iOS, and Android SDKs.

Firebase currently shares the same account and billing system as GCP, meaning that developers can already combine Firebase and GCP services. This can lead to interesting service combinations, for example exporting raw data from Firebase Analytics into BigQuery for realtime ad hoc analysis.

Starting today, Firebase products such as storage and cloud will begin to combine seamlessly as well.

With Google’s announcements, including increased support for cloud product integration in SDKs, developers have a greater opportunity to tie their own mobile apps to the Google Cloud.

Images: Pixabay, Google

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