Google offers the Firebase suite of application development tools, available free or at cost for higher degree of usages, priced flexibly accorded to features needed. The suite includes A/B testing and Crashlytics, Cloud Messaging (FCM) and in-app messaging, cloud storage and NoSQL storage (Cloud Firestore and Firestore Realtime Database), and other features supporting developers with flexible mobile application development.
$0.01
Per Verification
IBM Cloud Pak for Applications
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cloud Pak® for Applications (CP4Apps) is an end-to-end hybrid cloud application platform, providing flexibility for deployments, building new cloud-native applications, refactoring and re-platforming existing applications. Designed to leverage a collection of application runtimes, modernization tools and a Kubernetes container platform to adapt to their landscape needs.
Firebase should be your first choice if your platform is mobile first. Firebase's mobile platform support for client-side applications is second to none, and I cannot think of a comparable cross-platform toolkit. Firebase also integrates well with your server-side solution, meaning that you can plug Firebase into your existing app architecture with minimal effort.
Firebase lags behind on the desktop, however. Although macOS support is rapidly catching up, full Windows support is a glaring omission for most Firebase features. This means that if your platform targets Windows, you will need to implement the client functionality manually using Firebase's web APIs and wrappers, or look for another solution.
IBM Cloud Pak for Applications is clearly suitable for modernizing the WebSphere runtime from the heavy, complex and expensive WAS-ND, and to a lesser extent WAS-base, to the super simple, fast and lightweight WebSphere Liberty runtime. I guarantee, once you start using Liberty you'll never look back. Enough cannot be said about how awesome Transformation Advisor is. The output analysis it produces, along with the migration plan and associated artifacts, considerably simplifies both the decision-making process surrounding modernization and subsequent implementation. Without TA we would've made bad decisions by blindly picking unsuitable apps for moving from WAS to Liberty. Using the results from TA we've excluded multiple WAS apps from our immediate plans to migrate to Liberty, saving time and effort that probably would have resulted in a failed migration. We recently used Transformation Advisor to help us successfully migrate an app from Tomcat to WebSphere Liberty. We needed to make some changes to the Tomcat app, but TA helped highlight these required changes. Without TA I'm not sure we would have succeeded.
Extremely robust. Has about any tool you can think of under one roof making it extremely useful as a backup platform for data analytics or small teams that need something quickly.
Intuitive and easy UI/UX. Being made and owned by Google, you expect nothing less. Very easy to use for anyone that has any marketing or analytical experience especially in Google Analytics (which I just assume all marketers do).
Safe, secure, and sturdy. Never need to worry about downtimes or misinformation as it's as clean and safe as it is being run by Google.
FREE! What else is there to say. Unless you're an extremely large application handling hundreds of thousands to millions of users, this pay as you go plan will stay free.
Firebase/Firestore has very limited support for querying more complicated items; for example, performing a simple string search is not possible.
While upfront costs are low, costs can grow quickly if you're not careful about what you are being billed for.
Dashboards have at times shown different information to what is billed, and support from Google is less than stellar and not as effective as that from Amazon or Microsoft.
While the licensing is considerably simplified than it used to be, I still find it somewhat confusing. For example, WebSphere Liberty Core has an 8:1 VPC ratio. This is clear when dealing with VMs but it is still not clear to me as to whether we get an 8:1 ratio when running on OpenShift or whether we need to purchase additional OpenShift licenses to support running WebSphere Liberty Core in OpenShift.
Not so much related to IBM Cloud Pak for Applications, but while Transformation Advisor is an indispensable tool to help modernize to the WebSphere Liberty runtime, I wish we could run it against WebSphere Liberty itself. The reason being, we are now using TA as a single repository for our configurations. TA also highlights many potential issues when migrating to Liberty; these issues may also be applicable for apps already running in Liberty, we just don't know it yet.
Firebase functions are more difficult to use, there are no concepts of triggers or cascading deletes without the use of Firebase functions. Firebase functions can run forever if not written correctly and cause billing nightmares. While this hasn't happened to us specifically it is a thing that happens more than one realizes.
Our analytics folks handled the majority of the communication when it came to customer service, but as far as I was aware, the support we got was pretty good. When we had an issue, we were able to reach out and get support in a timely fashion. Firebase was easy to reach and reasonably available to assist when needed.
Before using Firebase, we exclusively used self hosted database services. Using Firebase has allowed us to reduce reliance on single points of failure and systems that are difficult to scale. Additionally, Firebase is much easier to set up and use than any sort of self hosted database. This simplicity has allowed us to try features that we might not have based on the amount of work they required in the past.
Our customer mission-critical core banking applications like Temenos T24 run on best of the breed IBM WebSphere Application Server which is java based-application server. IBM has kept up the promise of providing support, fixpack, and any update. As far as I know, at least by 2030, IBM is committed to continue with WHE which gives customers confidence in their current investments.
Firebase has been able to help us understand reliably, the drop-off in our user flows with their funnel feature. This has made it easy for us to be able to pinpoint weaknesses in our funnel and test and optimize with data as the dependent variable.
From an economic standpoint, we don't pay for Firebase which is great, but as the saying goes "You get what you pay for" also holds true in this context. As we looked to grow and scale, we looked for a paid solution.
From a developer resource standpoint, Firebase has been extremely easy to integrate into our app. Whether it be the event tracking, dynamic links or crash reporting we have not had to waste too much developer time thanks to their well-organized developer docs.
