Weighing Datastore vs. Firestore for new project

[Blaine Garrett]

Greetings,

I've been working with AppEngine for over 8 years between my last job and personal projects. For a new job, we're starting from scratch with AppEngine and GCloud. We are at a point of deciding on our storage mechanism (Datastore vs Firestore) and event messaging mechanisms.  Since you must commit to Datastore or Firestore in DS mode, or Native Firestore and it cannot be changed, we'd like to make as educated of a decision as possible up front. For the most part, Real Time updates and back end client support are our primary fuzzy areas yet. This link provided a lot of valuable information. 


Here are some remaining questions I have to help us decide if anyone could assist in answering. 

Q: Can either Node or the Python 3  client libraries support realtime updates in AppEngine Standard Env. 

Q: Firestore doesn't support Kinds/EntityGroups but does it support something recembling Ancestor Queries like datastore has? With reduced TXN limitations and better consistency in Firestore, is there any benefit to Ancestor Queries aside from queryability?

Q; Are realtime updates durable and/or persistent? - i.e. Would this be a dependable mechanism for data syncing to other systems?

Q: Are realtime updates limited to changes to data in Firestore or can we leverage the communication to publish our own events and provide our own handlers? 
Q: Give the above question, is there a more appropriate GCloud product than Firestore  for realtime durable/persistent messaging for web and server clients not as tightly coupled with the database implementation?

Q: Is there a general milestone when Firestore will come out of beta? re: SLA, etc?

Q: Pricing between Datastore and Firestore in Datastore mode appear the same, but is there additional cost overhead that we could estimate for Native Firestore mode?

Thanks in advance,
~ Blaine

[Katayoon (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hi Blaine,

I recommend to ask your questions in Google Cloud Firestore discussion group, since it is moderated with the Firestore specialists and they can address your questions more precisely.