
Firebase is Joining Google - vladstoick
https://www.firebase.com/blog/2014-10-21-firebase-joins-google.html
======
skrebbel
Congrats founders, YC, and other shareholders!

But still, I just started using Firebase, and this news makes it clear to me
that I should move off them as soon as I can. Firebase was an interesting
technology supplier: When they were a small company, I could count on it that
as a customer, I would count. Google is known to not give a damn about paying
customers (ref: all the Google Apps customers who lose their email (for
whatever reason) and get redirected to a FAQ page with answers to unrelated
questions). Google is also known to Be Evil: I'm not sure I dare waiting until
the terms change such that my user's data is subject to googlebot scanning.

Firebase's business model is aligned with my interests: the more users I have,
the more I (hopefully) earn, so the more I pay Firebase. I strongly doubt,
however, that Google is buying Firebase because they think they can get very
rich selling Firebase subscriptions. It's either going to turn out a
acquihire, or it is some part of a grand ecosystem plan. Acquihire means
they'll pull the plug sooner or later, grand ecosystem plan means vendor lock-
in. While I'm happy to be locked in to the services of a small independent
business, I'd think twice before becoming entirely dependent on a company that
could lose me as a customer and not even notice the slightest impact on their
bottom line.

I know all of the Firebase guys are reading this, and I don't mean to piss on
your parade. I'm certain you're not lying when you say that things are only
going to get better. But I'm also certain that your jobs don't depend on that
anymore, and when higher-ups decide to move the big boat's direction, Firebase
might be over sooner than any of us wants it to.

That's a pretty big risk to take as a startup that fully depends on Firebase
for their data storage.

~~~
johns
Startup dilemma pre-acquisition: "they're just a startup! how will I know
they'll be around in 12 months?! so risky!"

Startup dilemma post-acquisition: "they're no longer in control! how can I
trust they'll be around in 12 months!? so risky!"

~~~
christiansmith
I'd like to take that devil by the horns and strongly suggest that companies
like Firebase, who clearly deliver a critical infrastructure dependency for
anyone using their service, should open source their platform as an act of
good faith toward their customers.

No one wants to run yet another cluster, but anyone with an eye to business
continuity ought to want the assurance that they _can_ migrate to and from
their own servers if that need should arise.

That might not be in the short term interests of Firebase, but it's definitely
in the long term interests of their customers. Why would anyone ever base the
future of their own business on the exit needs of another company's investors?
It _is_ a ridiculous risk. As much as I love what Firebase has built, I'd
never use it for anything more than a toy project for that exact reason.

Basho, ElasticSearch and Docker(?) seem to be on a good path with commercial
open source models. Is there any reason that a startup like Firebase couldn't
do both? Offer their open source product as a service with non-critical value
adds? GitHub is another example that comes to mind. If they were to get bought
and shut down, it would be a pain in the ass to set up new remotes, but no one
would have to stop using git.

~~~
sanderjd
This is a great point. Just _running_ the infrastructure is a big enough
value-add. I wonder how well this is working for Discourse. Obviously a very
different type of platform, but they're using this model and appear, from the
outside, to be having success.

~~~
tburns
I'd also be very interested to see how things are turning out for Discourse as
a business. I've been keeping an eye on OSS product + hosted businesses for
awhile (Ghost being another one now).

------
mayop100
Hacker News -

I want to take this opportunity to personally say thank you! The community
here has been instrumental to our success. You’ve been our supporters, beta
testers, fans, and critics. Even the comment threads here have been a valuable
source of feedback :)

I want to reiterate a point that James made in the blog post: Firebase is here
to stay, and it’s only going to get better at Google. Our entire team is
joining Google, and James and I will continue to run things day-to-day. You’ll
still see us around the tech scene at meetups, conferences, and hackathons,
and we’ll still be active here and on Twitter.

Thanks again -- big things are coming!

~~~
flipside
Congrats! I remember the debut of firebase at a hackathon back when I could
barely code. Since then firebase has become my goto backend for new projects.

Firebase is awesome, keep up the great work!

~~~
mayop100
That first AngelHack? We remember it too. It was a ton of fun!

------
gwern
If anyone is curious, my old analysis (
[http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns](http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns)
) gives an estimate of 70% for Firebase surviving another 5 years:

    
    
        R> firebase <- data.frame(Product="Firebase", Dead=FALSE, Started=Sys.Date(), Ended=NA, Type="program", Profit=TRUE, FLOSS=FALSE, Acquisition=TRUE, Social=FALSE, Days=1, AvgHits=NA, DeflatedHits=mean(google$DeflatedHits), AvgDeflatedHits=NA, EarlyGoogle=FALSE)
        R> conditionalProbability(firebase, 5*365.25)
        [1] 0.693911886

~~~
onion2k
Interesting analysis, but I suspect you're missing something critical -
whether or not Google use the product internally. If other Google services
start to adopt Firebase (or they're already using it) then surely the
probability of it being killed off is _greatly_ reduced. The analysis you've
done works for standalone products, but I think it'll fall down for services.

~~~
christiansmith
This may not be any indication. A Firebase competitor named GoInstant was
bought by Salesforce, used to build a few things internally at that company,
and very recently shut down and the team integrated into the parent company.
Any outsiders that built anything with GoInstant were basically out of luck. I
have no idea how many users they had, and Firebase has greater visible
traction, so that may factor in as well.

------
gordonzhu
As a heavy Angular user, I wonder how much of a role the Angular team played
in driving this acquisition.

AngularFire has always been one of the most amazing things about Firebase. So
much so that I decided to build my business on it
([https://www.angularcourse.com](https://www.angularcourse.com)). Misko
(Angular creator) himself has said that 3-way binding with AngularFire was the
closest to fulfilling his vision of what Angular should be.

Also more than the technology, Google's getting a company that really cares
about the developer experience and knows how to design developer products.
This is improving but still really lacking in the Google Cloud product line.

Firebase is one of those products that really gets you exciting about
programming. Many people have told me about how they were amazed the first
time they saw real-time updates in Firebase forge. I know I spent an
embarrassing amount of time watching the colors change (green, red, orange) in
Forge too.

~~~
spankalee
> As a heavy Angular user, I wonder how much of a role the Angular team played
> in driving this acquisition.

Probably none. Angular is part of Ads, they're not in the Cloud group.

~~~
gordonzhu
It's true that they're in separate orgs inside the company, but Google is a
pretty open place and it's extremely common for different orgs to work
together. So I'm not sure that this observation really answers anything.

------
morgante
Darn, I was just planning to integrate Firebase on a project today. Now I'm
very hesitant to do so (if Google doesn't entirely pull the plug at some
point, I expect them to package it in with Google App Engine—which I have zero
interest in using).

Does anyone know of a good Firebase alternative which is either (1) still
independent or (2) run by a company with a reason to maintain it?

~~~
niutech
Some good Firebase alternatives:

[https://parse.com/](https://parse.com/) \- freemium

[http://backendless.com/](http://backendless.com/) \- freemium

[http://www.kinvey.com/](http://www.kinvey.com/) \- freemium

[http://deployd.com/](http://deployd.com/) \- open source

[http://firehose.io/](http://firehose.io/) \- open source

[http://www.baasbox.com/](http://www.baasbox.com/) \- open source

[https://www.meteor.com/](https://www.meteor.com/) \- open source

~~~
morgante
Most of the Freemium options seem to be targeted at either (a) mobile apps or
(b) enterprises (their homepages clearly target executives/managers, not
developers). They seem to want to own your whole stack. We have an existing
app, with just a small bit that needs to be realtime. Firebase is the perfect
solution, so it's really a shame that their future isn't bright.

As for the open source solutions, I specifically _want_ to pay someone money
to solve this for us. We've been running ShareJS, but it's annoying to
maintain and fix.

~~~
jkarneges
(Disclaimer: I work for Fanout)

If you want to add realtime to an existing project that already has a
database, then I suggest checking out Fanout (
[https://fanout.io/](https://fanout.io/) ). We intentionally don't want to own
your whole stack, and we've opened our code and protocols so that you're never
trapped. Would love to get your feedback.

------
jonpaul
If you're concerned about the future of Firebase and you're the roll your own
type, I wrote an article on how to build your own Firebase - it was extremely
popular earlier in the year.

[http://procbits.com/2014/01/06/poor-mans-firebase-leveldb-
re...](http://procbits.com/2014/01/06/poor-mans-firebase-leveldb-rest-and-
websockets)

------
walterbell
Does this mean Google is now providing the HackerNews api?

------
oori
Open source it now ! Core client, server and protocol.

Once google pulls the plug, we (the community) want to be ready with open-
source alternatives.

(oh and, James and Andrew really deserve it. they did good!)

~~~
VikingCoder
I'm looking forward to a sandstorm.io compatible version. I think this would
be great for enterprise uses.

~~~
imslavko
Funny enough SandStorm is built on Meteor :)

------
mwetzler
We love you Firebase! Your company and culture are an inspiration to all and
your platform in particular is a role model to other cloud database companies.
Best wishes from me personally and your many fans at Keen IO.

~~~
mayop100
Thank you! We're big fans of you all as well ; )

~~~
mwetzler
Are you staying in SF?

~~~
mayop100
Yep! We'll be moving to the Google SF offices in a few weeks.

------
StevePerkins
Has "acquired" become a dirty word lately? I read the announcements on both
the Firebase and Google Cloud pages, and it wasn't even clear to me that
Google had purchased the company (or a controlling interest, or whatever has
happened). The message is simply that Firebase "joined the Google Cloud
platform".

Lately, Google has been rolling out one-click installs for Redis, Cassandra,
RabbitMQ, etc. I had to read comments on HN to understand that this is a
financial integration rather than merely a technical one. What strange and
evasive messaging... why not just announce that the company has been
purchased?

~~~
nlh
I have zero connection to the deal so this is entirely speculation, but in
short, no, "acquired" has not become a dirty word. When a company is purchased
- it's usually described as such. (In fact, I think for a public company, it's
actually legally required that it be disclosed to shareholders in accurate
terms, though the exact level of detail -- i.e. $$ -- is dependent on the
"materiality" of the transaction.)

I noticed the exact same thing when I read the announcement(s) -- both
Firebase and Google were very specific in saying that "Firebase has joined
Google", not "Firebase has been acquired by Google".

So I'm guessing it means exactly what it says -- the Firebase team has been
hired by Google and the product is now a part of Google Cloud Platform.

------
mvanveen
Congratulations guys! Wearing my #11 beta sweatshirt as I write this. :)

It's been incredible to watch Firebase grow from a glimmering James' and
Andrew's eyes. It seems like just yesterday a few dozen of us were all
huddling around in a board room being onboarded for the beta.

Excited and optimistic for the future of Firebase :)

------
unlimit
Congrats.

Looks like every new exciting app/platform eventually gets acquired or
acquihired by the big fishes. We are all moving towards large monopolies in
the internet world. I was thinking of using firebase but I am not sure
anymore. Google just does not have any customer service.

------
philip1209
This is cool. If I recall correctly, one of the major issues with Firebase
scaling was that they resolved consistency issues by running everything in a
single datacenter. I wonder if something like Spanner could help them become a
more distributed system.

------
sevilo
having mixed feelings, on one hand I'm super happy that Firebase has grown to
where it is now, the product has always been awesome and with Google I can
only see it getting even better (Especially after seeing its Angular binding,
and how Angular features Firebase as its default backend). On the other hand,
I've loved how Firebase as a small team, always stays close with their users,
listen to feedback from them and provide a lot of help and guidance. I often
think of Firebase team members as friends and teachers. I don't know if they
will be able to stay this way after joining such a big firm like Google :'(

~~~
katowulf
We still love our amazing community and don't have any plans to change this.
We'll work hard to stay accessible and active.

~~~
vermontdevil
You may have no plans to change. But Google may have different plans down the
road. Their track record speaks for itself.

Regardless congrats and best of luck!

~~~
Lewisham
Google's track record of interacting directly with developers is really good:
public issue trackers, public mailing lists, monitored Stack Overflow tags...
What track record are you speaking of? What could devrel be doing better?

Disclaimer: Engineer on Cloud SQL team

~~~
vermontdevil
Sorry I meant shuttering down various sites after buying them. Not talking
about support.

------
chedigitz
AWESOME!!! Congrats to the team, Firebase has been a pleasure to use from day
one. The Angular fire integration has allowed me to prototype ideas in hours
as opposed to days. THANK YOU, for creating such clear documentation, clear
video presentations. The google acquisition makes it a easier to sell to some
of the higher ups now, :P. YAY!

------
wushupork
Congrats James - I've been watching your journey since Envolve. We were one of
the first hundred users to join Firebase (ID:68) and I remember how easy it
took to add real time notifications to one of my product (5 hrs I believe).
Your team's success is well deserved.

------
hellbanTHIS
Really hoping they bought it because it's something amazing that Amazon
doesn't have, or they're planning on using it themselves and want more control
over it.

If they shut it down and I have to rewrite all the stuff I've built with it
I'm going to freak the fuck out.

------
tomblomfield
Congratulations to James & the team. I remember when you were powering
RickyMartin.com !

~~~
ozgune
Yes, huge congrats guys! I don't know if I love the product or the team more.
:)

------
gailees
Still not sure how I feel about tech giants acquiring startups like Parse and
Firebase.

Is there some market explanation for why this tends to happen?

~~~
eldavido
Google has only two billion-dollar businesses: Adwords and Adsense. They've
been trying for the past 2-4 years to grow Apps/Docs/Drive platform into a
third one, and have had reasonable success getting into some larger
organizations like Motorola and some universities (Indiana U being one).

Even so, it's no secret how conflicted they are about "Docs". It's gone
through what, 3 major rebrandings in the last five years ("Drive"? "Docs"?
"Apps"?), plus it's more of a traditional, old-school enterprise sale, which
means salespeople, budgets, big complicated custom integrations, security
policy, etc., all things I don't see as Google's core strengths vs.
traditional enterprise vendors like Oracle, Microsoft, etc.

Google's big recent push has been getting more companies onto their cloud
infrastructure, which when you think about it, it's kind of nuts how they let
Amazon eat their lunch in this area. It's GOOGLE: these guys invent
filesystems (GFS/CFS), create their own Javascript compiler (V8), hell they've
even created two programming languages (Dart, golang) and a database (spanner)
-- how Amazon got ahead in cloud hosting really gives me pause.

In any case, "GCE" as they're calling it (Google Compute Engine) might be
Google's fourth billion-dollar business. Mobile is a huge thing: there are
tons of phones sold every day, developers love it, but it's still too hard.

I imagine the GCE execs faced a build vs. buy decision for "the thing that'll
make mobile development easier", push notifications, and a handful of other
use cases Firebase has really nailed. So given the choice between (1) building
something in-house, which means they're years behind, have to build a brand
from scratch, understand the problem space, and recruit the right team vs. (2)
write a big check, it's not a very hard choice IMO.

Source: I lived with a firebase employee, I work in a company that GCE's sales
team has visited, I spoke at AWS reinvent last year, and I built a venture-
funded company on Google Apps.

EDIT: I guess it's not correct to say it's just Adwords and Adsense anymore,
but it's still 90%+ advertising, and having some diversity there would go a
long way (see child comment)

~~~
wmil
> how Amazon got ahead in cloud hosting really gives me pause.

I think EC2 happened because Amazon expanded by building data centers.
Whenever they finished a new one they found they had a lot of surplus hosting
capacity that they couldn't monetize.

So EC2 was useful because the capacity was just sitting there.

Google always had ideas for new services. So they saved any extra capacity for
experimental products or tried to sell it through Google App Engine.

~~~
eldavido
I talked to some Amazon product managers, they said the narrative was closer
to "we had to learn how to scale to meet the holiday shopping season" than "we
had a bunch of extra capacity laying around". It's not a big leap of faith,
look at how much business retail chains do over the holiday season, and
imagine operating an e-commerce platform of Amazon's scale - you learn how to
do elastic infrastructure pretty quickly, esp. with Bezos's legendary
cheapness (doors for desks, etc.)

~~~
xentronium
Off-topic, but door-desks aren't really cheap at all.

Great recount by an old time employee:
[http://glog.glennf.com/blog/2011/10/16/the_true_story_of_the...](http://glog.glennf.com/blog/2011/10/16/the_true_story_of_the_amazon_door-
desk)

------
maheroku
I'm building my product on top of Firebase using AngularFire and this news
worries me so much. At first I thought it could be great but after reading all
the comments here I'm not sure what to think anymore. The CEO is saying that
they will continue developing the platform but apparently history shows that
such promises are not always kept. Firebase is such an awesome product that it
will be really terrible for Google to shut it down. I come from a Ruby On
Rails and SQL background and as soon as I saw an app running with Angular and
Firebase, I fell in love right away. I have already put too much time and
effort into making my product with Angular and Firebase that it is too late to
go back now, I will have to take the risk. Honestly if Google shuts it down,
I'm sure they will release the source code at the very least. I think I'm
going to be optimistic and hope that Google makes the right choice.

------
mastef
This is AMAZING :)

Just tweeted this yesterday : "Docker = future of IT infrastructure, Firebase
= future of product focused companies running circles around competition" and
today Firebase announced Google acquisition

Love it, big congrats!

Preferred stack now for app development would be Angular JS + Firebase + Go on
Google Apps Engine for triggers/additional logic I guess

------
joeblau
Congrats to the Firebase team. I remember stopping by your offices when there
were just 4 people in a tiny office at 153 Townsend. All of the work you've
done to help the community and build your product has been an inspiration.
Wish you the best on the next leg of your journey.

------
joshfinnie
First off congrats! I have been following Firebase for a long time and think
it's a wonderful product. That being said, I really hope they stick to their
word and use the resources at Google to expand Firebase keeping it open and
not make it a walled garden.

------
nobodysfool
I think it's a bit premature to be bought out at this time. You're still a
young company, and had just started to get traction, and I doubt you are
profitable yet. A couple more years of not being profitable and your plug is
pulled. That's just how it is in the corporate world. You look at all those
yahoo acquisitions and notice most of them aren't around anymore. They weren't
profitable, and so they were shut down. Good for you, but you had capital to
last a few more years, and you could afford to be a bit more aggressive, but
that didn't happen.

------
janl
BYOBaaS: Bring Your Own Backend as a Service. Open Source, bootstrapped
funding model, easy to use, Offline First, private data by default, cute
domain name: [http://hood.ie](http://hood.ie) — Very Fast [Web] App
Development.

Previous HN discussions:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767765)
/
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5514284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5514284)

Disclosure: Hoodie core dev here.

------
analogj
These guys have created an incredibly useful and unique platform. Congrats!

~~~
obiterdictum
Call me old-fashioned but I shy away from unique platforms precisely because
they are, well, unique, as you don't have a lot of vendor choice should you
decide to migrate for whatever reason.

~~~
analogj
Theres definitely that fear of vendor lockin right now, because theres no
standard yet. But on the other hand, the possibilities that firebase opens up
are definitely worth that lockin for some users. There's going to be other
alternatives sooner or later, now its just about determining how much you
trust Google to keep firebase alive as is.

~~~
reshambabble
It'll be interesting to see what Google does with firebase. There are already
alternatives out there - but question is - which of them will succeed next?

------
drawkbox
I guess the mobile focused PaaS phase has fully cycled. Google has Firebase,
Facebook has Parse and Amazon has Cognito. Still some room for independents
now that they got bought up.

------
drdaeman
So, now all Firebase customers' data belongs* to Gogle?

*) Not in legal sense, obviously, but as a fact who handles storage and transmission of the data.

------
primis
I'm gonna miss the little bottles of hot sauce they gave out at hackathons. I
put it on everything they fed us. <sigh> I'm not too sure how I feel about
start ups getting acquired by big corporate. Sure its a good way to acquire
fresh ideas and talent, but it prevents new billion dollar companies from
forming.

------
ianstormtaylor
Wow, huge congrats to everyone at Firebase! You all seriously deserve
it—amazing people, hard workers and great product.

------
72deluxe
Am I missing something about what Firebase is? Is it just a database system
with a web API? I don't mean this disparagingly but don't most people just run
their own database inside a VPS somewhere or a server and send data to/from
that via their own interface? Am I missing something?

~~~
dstaley
Firebase is geared towards building applications that need to update their
data in realtime. When you change data in Firebase (either by adding data or
modifying something that's already there), all connected clients are notified
of the change, allowing you to update your UI to match the new data. While
many people use it as a backend, it really shines when you take advantage of
these notifications.

~~~
72deluxe
Ah OK. Thanks for the info. It saves you having to write a database system,
the API and implement web sockets then. Thanks!

------
jonstokes
Count me in the "Thank God I'm not a Firebase customer" camp, because that was
my reaction on reading this news. I think Google is still a net force for Good
in the world, but the fact that the reaction here is so more-or-less uniform
cannot possibly be healthy for the company.

------
s9ix
Congrats - this is awesome, and a huge step for you all. Excited to hear what
else is in store on the 4th.

------
asuffield
Welcome to the chocolate factory. You're going to find this a very interesting
experience.

------
NicoJuicy
I recently started using SignalR for some of my apps. What is the difference
between SignalR and Firesharp? (both are realtime, only SignalR is more or
less self hosted on first perspective)

~~~
jbigelow76
I think SignalR is more analogous to socket.io in the Node ecosystem than it
is to Firebase. But that's just me.

------
Tepix
Firebase? Their customer database was stolen in September 2013 (I started
receiving phishing emails), I reported it to them but never heard back.

After that I decided not to become a customer of theirs.

------
lnanek2
Unfortunate, Google has a reputation for killing acquisitions. Let's hope the
founders manage to escape and recreate their product after, like Dodgeball vs.
Foursquare.

------
650REDHAIR
Huge congrats to you guys!

Still loving the name "Plankton".

------
ryanpardieck
This is great. I hope you guys don't go away. I've been meaning to explore the
google cloud a bit more anyway, though, I guess.

------
joshdance
Is there a service that allows you to build on top of an Backend as a Service?
So you could swap in and out Firebase, Parse, others?

------
Shofo
Well now the stars are aligning. Google now has their way to begin the push on
IoT with Nest, Glass and Phone data all linked contextually.

My watch can sense my body and ambient temperature, which tells Nest the
optimum temp for my house and my phone can tell Nest my proximity to my house
so it knows when to turn on. Shit just got real! Congrats to the Firebase
team.

------
pycassa
I'm not familiar with firebase, Is it like Parse? If so what is better?

~~~
myhf
It's a backend-as-a-service, like Parse, but based on realtime server-push
functionality.

------
CmonDev
"Two big reasons."

Cash and equity. Corrected the next two paragraphs for you.

------
mrmch
Woot, congrats James and team. Google will make a good home :)

------
stephenitis
I love the product I hope google brings a lot to the table.

------
mot0rola
Congrats Firebase! Keep up the great work!

------
TheAceOfHearts
Any guess for how much they got acquired?

------
Finbarr
Congrats James and the Firebase team!

------
bitsweet
Congrats James & team!

------
aikah
Congratulations

------
cdelsolar
HOW MUCH

------
untog
Congratulations on not using the word "journey" once in your blog post or in
this message.

~~~
j_baker
Serious question: what's wrong with the word "journey"?

~~~
ryanSrich
It's an overused buzzword that has no meaning anymore. Every company that gets
acquired has an "amazing journey".

~~~
hyperbovine
Putting in 100 hours a week for 3-10 years and getting a huge payoff at the
end does sort of sound like an amazing journey though.

