The firebase documentation includes a warning that if you use a kill switch to stop using firebase when a budget cap is exceeded, as follows:
Warning: This example removes Cloud Billing from your project,
shutting down all resources. Resources might not shut down gracefully,
and might be irretrievably deleted. There is no graceful recovery if
you disable Cloud Billing. You can re-enable Cloud Billing, but there
is no guarantee of service recovery and manual configuration is
required.
I'm trying to investigate what gets irretrievably deleted. Does the datastore get deleted when the kill switch is activated? Is there any opportunity to save data previously stored in cloud firestore, before the deletion takes place? Is there a way to download the database so that I can keep a back up in this scenario?
Please review the following reply from Firebase Team member(samstern) to gain more clarity on this:
these things are handled on a per-product basis and each product has different thresholds for quota overages and different procedures for what happens to inactive resources in a bad state.
For instance I know in Realtime Database if your DB is too big for the
free plan after you downgrade from a paid plan we will not delete
your data automatically. Instead you'll just be stopped from using the
database until you restore your billing.
However that statement clearly says that some products may delete data
if you pull Cloud Billing. It could be for technical reasons, it could
be for policy reasons.
If you want to turn off a product without risking this pulling your
billing account is NOT the best way to do this. It's the nuclear
option if you get into a bad situation and want to get out at all
costs. Instead you should use per-product APIs to shut down the
individual product or service and prevent future usage. This could
include doing things like flipping off APIs in the APIs console,
changing security rules to prevent all further writes, deleting Cloud
Functions, etc
The best source of information I've been able to uncover in answer to this particular question is a discussion on reddit which indicates that you can't recover access to your data, until you pay the bill (including blow out charges) - so maybe that buys some time, but if you don't pay, the project gets deleted. There may also be lost data for things happening at the time the kill switch activates.
Related
I'm currently working in a social network app and I need to do a search feature. Firestore does not support these kind of queries, so I need to use an external service like Algolia.
The problem is that the free plan does not support connecting to external websites/APIs other than Google's own ones, so I can't connect to Algolia to get my search system working.
I have read multiple stories about devs paying high bills because of loops or errors in their code, and as the Blaze plan is a pay-to-go plan, they get charged what they used. If a loop generated 10TB of files they will get charged for that.
I also know that Blaze plan's features are free as long as each of them (individually) stay below the limits of the free Spark plan.
So as my question says, is there a way to set limits? For example, I would like to tell Firebase to limit my cloud functions invocations to 100k per month. That way it would be free and I would never be able to get over 100k as it's limited, which means I'll never get billed for that.
Take into account that the only thing I need right now from a paid plan is the connection to external networks. I don't need anything else as we're just starting and the app is not in production, so there's no need for huge limits.
Every Firebase project is also a Google Cloud Platform project. This means that many of the advanced features of Google Cloud Platform are also available for your Firebase project.
For example, you can set up billing alert for your Firebase project, so that you are alerted when the usage reaches a certain level. While you can't configure it to switch off the project at some point, the alert should typically be quite good for alerting you to unusual usage patterns.
For more on this see:
Tracking your spending with budgets in a recent blog post.
The GCP documentation on how to set budget alerts, which is what Firebase uses under the hood.
The GCP documentation now also has a section on capping (disabling) billing to stop usage. This is a brute force approach though and may lead to data being lost, so I'd recommend investigating all other options first.
Update (December 2020): Firebase's Todd Kerpelman just released a series of videos where he disables billing using the process from the documentation mentioned above.
You cannot set spending limits to your app now.
As of December 12, 2019, you can no longer create spending limits, but
you can change or remove existing spending limits.
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#spending_limit
You can create budgets, which will alert you when reaching the budget. But it won't stop the usage when hitting the budget.
https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets#add-new-budget
The screenshot here seems to show a Spending Limit setting for Firebase projects: Firebase: Budget and Daily Spending Limit
That settings page is located here (the Spending Limit setting apparently only shows up once you set up billing for the project): https://console.cloud.google.com/appengine/settings
It's disabled in the poster's case, but I think that's only because he connected it up to a "NodeJS App Engine app", which isn't the case for many Firebase developers.
I haven't tried it yet myself, but will do so once I start a paid plan.
EDIT: Yep, the setting shows up once you switch to a paid plan. (in my case, Blaze) I don't have enough traffic yet to confirm that it works as expected, but if I find later that it doesn't, I'll give an update here.
"This example shows you how to cap costs and stops usage for a project by disabling Cloud Billing. This will cause all Google Cloud services to terminate non-free tier services for the project."
Google Cloud Source
Context: I am total Google Cloud begginer and I have just convinced my company headers to use Firestore Realtime Database for pushing transaction status to our mobile application. We have around 4 millions users that will use significantly our application for small money transfers. Now-a-days we use the concept of polling from Android/IOS to our Microservice endpoints and it will replaced by Firebase SDK imported to our Mobile app which will listen/observe to our Firestore Collection following few Firestore Rules. Since all money transfer will be confirmed/denied in short time (from few seconds to 1 or 2 minutes) the idea of replacing polling by a real reactive approach straigh from Firestore sounded and is already ongoing coding.
The issue: Firstly I don't what to compare solutions. It is just my reality: the prodution support operators must look after our internal Dashboard. Isn't allowed to them look at Google Dashboard Console (please accept this for this question). I need get on demand metrics of our FIrestore. It is nothing to do with Google pricing. It is just our demand: they want to see metrics like:
how many users listening at the same time now
how many users took some exception during connection
is there any user holding connection for more than X minute
when was the connection pick this morning
any exception of any type surrounding our Firestore database
I read Code Samples carefully follow the sample step-by-step trying to figure out some idea if there is some API providing the answers I am looking for.
So, my straight question is: is there such type of Google API providing metrics about my Firestore Database? Maybe following the same idea we found in Performance Monitor which works on Mobile side also some similar aproach on Firestore side.
*** Edited
Future readers may find worth read also about a way to get Firestore metrics info striagh from curl/postman
A couple of things: You mentioned both Firestore and Realtime Database; just wanted to make sure that you are aware that those are two different databases offered under the Firebase umbrella.
how many users listening at the same time now
is there any user holding connection for more than X minute
Yes, there's a dashboard: https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6317517?hl=en. Including lots of options, like users active in the last 30 mins.
how many users took some exception during connection
any exception of any type surrounding our Firestore database
Yes, you can track errors and other logging via Stack Driver logging. These can give you reports on your cloud functions.
https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/monitoring
Where can I find Stackdriver in Firebase console?
when was the connection pick this morning
For this one, I'm not sure if you mean A. when did somebody log on in the morning, or B. what was the time that there was the peak \ most usage. If B see 1. If A,
Real-time database has the concept of presence, which lets you know if a user is currently logged in or not. See examples here from the official documentation:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/solutions/presence
and this post
How to make user presence mechanism using Firebase?
Also applies to your
is there any user holding connection for more than X minute
..............
Edit in response to comments: I believe you are experiencing the XY problem https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem where you are focused on a particular solution, even though your problem has other solutions. User metrics, database events, and errors are all accessible through both dashboards and cloud functions. You can cURL cloud functions if you wish, or set up cron functions to auto report, or set up database trigger functions to log errors. So, while the exact way you want this to work may not exist, you just need to connect existing tools to get the result you want.
I am developing an Android app which basically does this: On the landing(home) page it shows a couple of words. These words need to be updated on daily basis. Secondly, there is an 'experiences' tab in which a list of user experiences (around 500) shows up with their profile pic, description,etc.
This basic app is expected to get around 1 million users daily who will open the app daily at least once to see those couple of words. Many may occasionally open up the experiences section.
Thirdly, the app needs to have a push notification feature.
I am planning to purchase a managed wordpress hosting, set up a website, and add a post each day with those couple of words, use the JSON-API to extract those words and display them on app's home page. Similarly for the experiences, I will add each as a wordpress post and extract them from the Wordpress database. The reason I am choosing wordpress is that it has ready made interfaces for data entry which will save my time and effort.
But I am stuck on this: will the wordpress DB be able to handle such large amount of queries ? With such a large userbase and spiky traffic, I suspect I might cross the max. concurrent connections limit.
What's the best strategy in my case ? Should I use WP, or use firebase or any other service ? I need to make sure the scheme is cost effective also.
My app is basically very similar to this one:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ekaum.ekaum
For push notifications, I am planning to use third party services.
Kindly suggest the best strategy I should go with for designing the back end of this app.
Thanks to everyone out there in advance who are willing to help me in this.
I have never used Wordpress, so I don't know if or how it could handle that load.
You can still use WP for data entry, and write a scheduled function that would use WP's JSON API to copy that data into Firebase.
RTDB-vs-Firestore scalability states that RTDB can handle 200 thousand concurrent connections and Firestore 1 million concurrent connections.
However, if I get it right, your app doesn't need connections to be active (i.e. receive real-time updates). You can get your data once, then close the connection.
For RTDB, Enabling Offline Capabilities on Android states that
On Android, Firebase automatically manages connection state to reduce bandwidth and battery usage. When a client has no active listeners, no pending write or onDisconnect operations, and is not explicitly disconnected by the goOffline method, Firebase closes the connection after 60 seconds of inactivity.
So the connection should close by itself after 1 minute, if you remove your listeners, or you can force close it earlier using goOffline.
For Firestore, I don't know if it happens automatically, but you can do it manually.
In Firebase Pricing you can see that 100K Firestore document reads is $0.06. 1M reads (for the two words) should cost $0.6 plus some network traffic. In RTDB, the cost has to do with data bulk, so it requires some calculations, but it shouldn't be much. I am not familiar with the pricing small details, so you should do some more research.
In the app you mentioned, the experiences don't seem to change very often. You might want to try to build your own caching manually, and add the required versioning info in the daily data.
Edit:
It would possibly be more efficient and less costly if you used Firebase Hosting, instead of RTDB/Firestore directly. See Serve dynamic content and host microservices with Cloud Functions and Manage cache behavior.
In short, you create a HTTP function that reads your database and returns the data you need. You configure hosting to call that function, and configure the cache such that subsequent requests are served the cached result via hosting (without extra function invocations).
I am using firebase database and my question is, for example how fast can I reach 1GB if i have 100 users each storing worth 10 document pages of microsoft word full of text everyday, for one month?
Word documents would be stored in Firebase Storage, not the realtime database. Realistically, the only way you will be billed anything for using the Firebase platform is if your app gets a significant of usage. I suspect that 99% of firebase apps do not generate any billing whatsoever. ...that's just a hunch.
If you do run into billing issues, that will/would be a good thing.
Although this question is too broad since it lacks various variables like the number of users, size of the files and how this data is presented in the app I will try to give my $0.02 on this in a very generic way which can also be interpreted as how not to end up with a huge bill while using firebase,
Even though Firebase provides a sufficient space to test out the app in production there is a lot of ways in which things can go bad real quick like,
1) since firebase automatically handles the sync this additional read/write call comes out of your quota apart from the call you trigger check-out how one app developers found this out the hard way
2) if you have bad DB schema/design that you have not addressed, then you end up making multiple calls to the server to fetch the data which again bloats up the number of calls you make read about this here
3) Not setting spending limits and alerts, this should be a mandatory step to avoid a lot of the above problems even though the docs clearly gives an indication on how to set this up
These are some of the cases that I have come across I hope this serves as a guideline to set up your app
Is there any way to debug firebase instance like number of reads / writes / live connections etc.
We have hit the firebase outage many times and it is only firebase support tell us about these metrics.
Are there tools available which if I run on instance let me know all above information ?
Thanks
You can use the Firebase Profiler tool to get an idea of your bandwidth consumption but as stated by the doc, it's not a tool to estimate your billing. Many other factors affect your billing, such as protocol overhead, ssh overhead etc. You can read more on the Understand Realtime Database Billing here.
The Firebase profiler can however helps you to see potential issues with your database, and potential heavy listeners that sync too many data. Keep in mind that every time you write a on listener, firebase will download all the initial data at this node, each time, thus increasing bandwidth usage.