How PropTech Changed the Real Estate Industry?
Let’s start with the most obvious question – What is PropTech? The name PropTech is an amalgamation of the words “property” and “technology”, and is also commonly referred to […]
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When you’re slowly reaching the scaling phase, you want to optimize the vast majority of processes and decrease overall operational costs. We’ve talked about it in the article on how to scale a startup business. A good way to optimize your costs is to invest in easy and cheap to maintain solutions – like Firebase. It’s not like we’ve just discovered a secret way to save money upfront. We mentioned Firebase many times, for example when talking about some of its pros and cons. Today we would like to focus on the Firebase services that help entrepreneurs optimizing IT-related costs and saving time.
There are enough Firebase services to build a solid backend infrastructure for your product. Obviously, we wouldn’t talk about it if it was lame. Let’s see what the platform has to offer!
It turns out that the list of this BaaS (Backend as a Service) solution is quite extensive.
If I would name one reason why you should build your app using Firebase – this is it.
Developers usually have to make HTTP calls to get new data and sync it. This is how most databases work. Realtime database is called this way because it allows for instant synchronization of data in realtime to all connected clients. It sends new data to everyone as soon as it’s updated which makes a huge difference during the app development process.
This cloud-hosted database stores data as one large JSON tree and instead of connecting to it with standard HTTP, you do it through WebSocket which is much faster. What’s more, it can work offline! The database caching the data in the device memory and when the Internet connection is back, the data is immediately synchronized.
The tool provides a simple way to control access to your data. It has its own authentication system that allows access to an app through a one-time code sent to a user’s phone number. It can be done via SMS but also 3rd party auth methods such as Google, Facebook but also Github, and Microsoft. To have even greater control, you can write your own security rules to get access to the app.
Firebase Auth system helps you easily create and manage users…for free!. This service is available for Android and iOS and you can have up to 10,000 free messages per month.
Firebase provides Cloud Storage that lets you simply store and upload user-generated content, including photos or videos. This way you can include some eye-catching materials into your app. It saves files in Google Cloud Storage directly from the client. The tool has also an option to write security rules to protect the content. It’s also one of the Firebase services that is free!
On the list of Firebase services, there is also Hosting.
Firebase Hosting provides an SSL certificate and has a built-in CDN that you can use to accelerate the transfer of data across the continents. It enables you to view and test changes locally. If you need to give access to your work to other members of your team, you can simply create sharable, temporary preview URLs of your site. The Hosting also offers GitHub integration.
Is it all nice and safe? It has to be. Cloud providers have a lot of strict regulations to follow in order to be able to sell their services. Think this way. Firebase is held by Google. A company like this has to have the actual privileges that prove all data will be fully safe and protected from any hostile activity.
All of the Firebase services are designed in a way to scale and grow along with your app. When your product is used by more and more users, Firebase makes it easier to increase the cloud capacity without major problems or complications. And when your audience grows unexpectedly fast, it’s a true life-saving feature. It’s more than a database. The services are everything you need to deliver a great product.
We say that again – Firebase services, even though are great, can’t meet all expectations. When your product is rather complex or requires even more advanced security, the platform won’t be enough. It’s a good start though!
If you want to speed up your time-to-market or you want to optimize the IT maintenance costs – you’ll do that easily with Firebase.
If you need support or you need a dedicated backend solution – check our cloud services!
