Future of the Realtime Database

[M]

Realtime Database Incident #17094:

Since Realtime Database does not yet have multi-region redundancy, there was no failover mechanism to mitigate.
(...)
We will continue to work on improved redundancy. For example, we released our next-gen, highly scalable database, Firestore (currently in beta) to address some of these needs.

Great that you will continue to work on improved redundancy, but that you exemplify this by the release of Firestore does not signify a great future for the Realtime Database, IMO.

Is the Realtime Database still in active development? Or is it mostly in maintenance mode while additional resources are exceedingly being put into Firestore?

[Piotr Kaminski]

I'd love to know as well -- hopefully Google's infamous bias towards secrecy won't prevent an on-the-record answer.

    -- P.

--

  Piotr Kaminski <pi...@ideanest.com>

  "That bun is dirty.  Don't eat that bun."

[Kato Richardson]

Hi Folks,

I hear your concerns. We're also very frustrated by the incident. We've made some great improvements in reliability and uptime since the pre-Google era, and while short lived and well handled, this outage was a discouraging setback for us. We'll continue to work hard on this front.

We care deeply about Realtime Database and there are no plans to deprecate at present. It would be a wonderful simplification if Firestore and RTDB reached feature parity and could easily merge--one less important decision to make about your app stack. Until then, they both have their place.

I can't share roadmaps, as we all like to lament now and then, I'd like  like to point out that we just released multi-db's per project and conditional rest requests launched earlier this year.  Hopefully that's decent evidence that there's still plenty of activity taking place for RTDB.

We're also posting incident reports now, as you've obviously noticed. It's the sort of silent launch you may not notice as a developer, but involves significant effort behind the scenes. If you look carefully, you'll note that a part of that incident report includes details on where we failed and future work (*gasp*) we plan to do to improve. It's like a little mini roadmap! See what we did there? Now if we could just publish those without the incident... : )

☼, Kato

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[Piotr Kaminski]

Thanks Kato, that's a reasonably strong statement of support for RTDB given the constraints you're working under.  Also many thanks for the additional transparency on the incident reports; the boilerplate "We will conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to prevent or minimize future recurrence." was wearing a little thin.

Now, a devious mind might "arrange" for some harmless "incidents" so they could reveal more of the roadmap while staying within the rules...  ;)  Just kidding!

    -- P.

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[M]

Thanks, Kato. To be honest, I wasn't expecting an answer... so your answer is greatly appreciated! I guess what worried me the most, was the fact that Firestore is built upon a Google Cloud product, while the RTDB only rests within Firebase.

I will stay calm and assume the RTDB will stick around!

On Saturday, 2 December 2017 17:06:51 UTC+1, Kato Richardson wrote:

Hi Folks,

I hear your concerns. We're also very frustrated by the incident. We've made some great improvements in reliability and uptime since the pre-Google era, and while short lived and well handled, this outage was a discouraging setback for us. We'll continue to work hard on this front.

We care deeply about Realtime Database and there are no plans to deprecate at present. It would be a wonderful simplification if Firestore and RTDB reached feature parity and could easily merge--one less important decision to make about your app stack. Until then, they both have their place.

I can't share roadmaps, as we all like to lament now and then, I'd like  like to point out that we just released multi-db's per project and conditional rest requests launched earlier this year.  Hopefully that's decent evidence that there's still plenty of activity taking place for RTDB.

We're also posting incident reports now, as you've obviously noticed. It's the sort of silent launch you may not notice as a developer, but involves significant effort behind the scenes. If you look carefully, you'll note that a part of that incident report includes details on where we failed and future work (*gasp*) we plan to do to improve. It's like a little mini roadmap! See what we did there? Now if we could just publish those without the incident... : )

☼, Kato

On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 2:33 PM, Piotr Kaminski <pi...@ideanest.com> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 9:07 PM, M <markfj...@gmail.com> wrote:

Realtime Database Incident #17094:

Since Realtime Database does not yet have multi-region redundancy, there was no failover mechanism to mitigate.
(...)
We will continue to work on improved redundancy. For example, we released our next-gen, highly scalable database, Firestore (currently in beta) to address some of these needs.

Great that you will continue to work on improved redundancy, but that you exemplify this by the release of Firestore does not signify a great future for the Realtime Database, IMO.

Is the Realtime Database still in active development? Or is it mostly in maintenance mode while additional resources are exceedingly being put into Firestore?

I'd love to know as well -- hopefully Google's infamous bias towards secrecy won't prevent an on-the-record answer.

    -- P.

--

  Piotr Kaminski <pi...@ideanest.com>

  "That bun is dirty.  Don't eat that bun."

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