Isn't firebase cloud-functions from google doing mostly the same?

sudhirj · on June 12, 2018

Firebase cloud functions are more AWS Lambda competition, where you write JS functions that follow a particular interface and can do certain things.

This is being able to deploy regular NodeJS servers with no special changes or modifications, and have them run an autoscaling sandbox that does a really good job of keeping the server alive (and charging you) only when absolutely necessary. Also scales up infinitely (up to your budget, anyway) in a pinch.

tmpz22 · on June 12, 2018

Wasn't Ingress/Niantic using App engine when they were going through their scalability problems? Nothing scales infinitely.

vemacs · on June 12, 2018

if you are talking about Pokemon GO, then no. i was on GKE (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/bringing-Pokemo...).

filleduchaos · on June 12, 2018

You can deploy a regular NodeJS server via firebase cloud functions as well.

thesandlord · on June 12, 2018

The execution and billing model is a bit different.

App Engine is great for full HTTPS servers, and is billed on an instance basis (it does scale to zero when unused)

GCF is great for responding to events in the cloud (Pub/Sub, Storage, webhook, Firebase database) and is billed on a per function execution basis.

The actual runtimes are quite similar, though GCF is still Node 6 based for now.

(I work for GCP)

pspeter3 · on June 12, 2018

I think Firebase Functions are more restricted in what/when they can run