Building scalable web applications with Firestore — new reference guide
Julien Phalip
Solutions Architect, Google Cloud
If you've been building and maintaining large web or mobile apps, you've probably heard of Firestore, Google's scalable, serverless document database. But perhaps you’ve also wondered precisely how Firestore matches up to other Google Cloud database products. To help you understand Firestore's core strengths, we've recently published a new reference guide that explains Firestore's differentiating features like real-time updates, offline data persistence, and transactions.
Firestore particularly shines in cases where you care both about scale and speed of development. If you need to quickly build an application that you expect to serve a large amount of traffic, then Firestore is a powerful option to consider.
For example, we've recently heard that Google Cloud customers are using Firestore to rapidly build and deploy new applications in response to the abrupt and unforeseen disruptions caused by the COVID-19 crisis. By placing Firestore as a front end for their mainframe database system, government agencies can avoid slowdowns and downtimes under the suddenly increasing loads. Healthcare agencies can develop mobile apps with Firestore to keep the public informed, support initial virus self-diagnosis, and allow residents to contact health officials.
This newly published guide provides reference architectures for real-world use cases in retail, media, telecommunications, gaming, and internet of things (IoT). For example, the guide describes an architecture for a collaborative content editing system, as shown in the diagram below.
Media leader The New York Times chose the Firestore database service as they built a truly real-time collaboration tool that lets multiple writers and editors make changes in docs at the same time, keeping track of the newest updates. Firestore is designed for just this type of task, since it supports offline and real-time sync.
Check out the new Firestore guide for all the details and next steps for building your own scalable solutions using Firestore.
Hear from the product team and other customers at Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir on what’s new and how they are innovating with Firestore in these sessions:
