I’ve only skimmed the docs so far but I believe they offer a full turnkey no config required solution for 2 frameworks currently but like Cloud Run you can bring literally whatever you like here as a backend assuming you can get it into a container.
Looking over the feature set this honestly looks amazing and is ironically where most businesses want to ultimately get to (everything is integrated, security, performance, logging etc all just work, no resource wastage, proper separation of concerns etc).
Honestly this might actually be the best starting point going on the internet right now for many businesses.
But then Vercel leapfrogged the legacy clouds just by white-labeling and packaging their individual offerings into a nice GUI, combining basic file hosting, a Node server, a CDN, serverless, KV, DB, etc... while simultaneously building up Next.js. These days it takes only like 3-5 minutes and like two clicks to deploy a new Next (or other framework) codebase to Vercel. It all "just works" too, and is free for dev projects and $20/mo for their basic paid plan (which is enough to build off of).
The cynicism is well-deserved, IMO, when Google is so late to this space (there are many companies doing this already), so quick to sunset everything, and seemingly completely preoccupied with AI these days. After the market failure of Angular, they seemed to stop caring about boring business web apps as anything more than a side thought. It's a very risky move to launch a startup on their stack.
I’ve really enjoyed using Firebase so far as the backend for my in-development chrome extension.
Using Firebase Auth, Cloud Functions, Hosting, Firestore, and the local emulator.
Now if I ever make a NextJs web app, I’d probably use Firebase app hosting
I'm generally a fan of GCloud over AWS, but I don't see any advantage of this over Vercel. Vercel is way easier to use (as a dev) than anything I've seen in GCloud or Firebase. And them being behind Next.js means it's hard to find a better fit and feature parity (such as for automatic image optimizations) in other hosts... there's vendor lock-in, definitely, but with a much lower risk of overnight sunsetting.
This is a side project for Google that will probably disappear if/when it fails to pick up enough steam. For Vercel, this is their main line of business. Why should anyone choose Firebase?
I loved AngularJS v1 when it first came out. The Angular 2+ learning curve was high and React seemed to just leapfrog over it and explode in popularity. In the last five years or so, I've only seen one Angular codebase and it was really hard to troubleshoot it due to the lack of easily available "me too" questions online. I haven't heard it discussed at all in a good decade or so now; even if the code is good, it seems like the mindshare is completely gone, at least in my circles?
I’m barely making this up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390833
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33737577
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34961069
