I can not find it anywhere, so I hope someone already stumbled upon this and can give me an answer.
I have been playing for a long time with Firebase remote config. In some occasions I have set parameters to be applied with different values to certain % of my user base.
Recently I started being interested in proper A/B testing and saw that Firebase has a feature for this (in beta right now). In the description of the A/B testing feature they state that one of the use cases is by setting parameters through remote config to alter the app's behaviour (makes sense, this is what I did until now).
My question though is whether A/B testing feature is doing anything different (or in addition to) to what remote config is doing. In particular, I am very interested in knowing whether remote config ensures me that when users open the app multiple times they will always be getting the same remote config values (maybe through tracking their device/user ID?) or is this only achieves if I use A/B config?
My experiments on this are not conclusive. It seems though that remote config does not ensure the same values over time.
Firebase A/B Testing builds on top of Firebase Remote Config, and Google Analytics for Firebase (and some other Firebase products) to offer full A/B testing capabilities.
Once a user is part of a certain group in an A/B Testing experiment, they will remain part of that group for the duration of the experiment.
When you use Firebase Remote Config without A/B Testing, you are in control of the groups completely yourself. So in that case you determine what value(s) the user gets.
Related
Suppose we have a site on Google Firebase Hosting that routes some requests to a Google Cloud Run service. The service is considered entirely an implementation detail and its only client is the single website. The only reason for using a Cloud Run service is that it is the only suitable technical option within the Firebase platform.
Now, suppose that the API of the service may have a breaking change with every update, so the Firebase Hosting content must change too. How do you update or roll back both parts together so as to avoid incompatibilities?
Straightforwardly, we can update the service and the site content in separate steps, but that means some requests from the old revision of the site may reach the new revision of the service or the other way around, causing errors due to API mismatch. The same issues are present when rolling back the site content and the service at the same time.
One theoretical solution would be to deterministically route requests to different service revisions based on revision labels, but that is not supported on Cloud Run.
One realistic solution would be to create a new service for every update of the site content. However, that would result in unbounded accumulation of services which are not automatically deleted like service revisions are.
Another solution (proposed below) would be to maintain backwards compatibility in the service - it would support both the latest and the previous API version. However, this can be considered an unnecessary overhead. Since the two parts (static content and the service) have no real need to ever be updated independently, it would be very convenient to avoid the overhead of maintaining backwards compatibility in the service.
For what I know there is no way to make this update in a single transaction to avoid this behavior you mentioned as Firebase and Cloud Run are different products.
Also a good Practice in API design is to allow Service Evolution this means that updating the API shall not break the apps consuming it and new versions of the app shall be able to evolve in a way that they can consume the current API.
Something that is done when a new API will not allow retrocompatibility is to have different endpoints this is why some APIs are apiName/V1/method and apiName/v2/method but in this case both versions of the API are deployed.
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 want to be able to add domains to Firebase hosting with the API instead of the web UI, is that possible?
I want to add potentially hundreds of domains, is there a domain limit per project in Firebase?
As far as I can tell from the entire CLI documentation, there isn't any way to do this.
Lets take a step back and consider what the web UI process involves i.e. the generation of a TXT record to add to your DNS records, after verifying the presence of said TXT record on the domain, providing A records that you (authorized owner) add to allow redirecting to your firebase hosted site.
In my opinion, this very manual back and forth is necessary as a security measure. The only way it is taken out of the equation via the CLI is by providing a means for you to authenticate ownership of a domain (registered with any one of many domain registrars), and being granted authorization to change your A records. These are both outside the scope of Firebase, and could potentially introduce severe security flaws. Regardless, even if it existed, it would still have to be step-by-step and somewhat manual via CLI rather than the single command it sounds like you're looking for.
It is not possible to add custom domains automatically through an API at this time.
Nor would it allow you to create a reseller or multi-tenant project (i.e. connect a large number of domains or subdomains dynamically) since you cannot connect more than about 36 domains connected to one project.
It's possible to add domains using Firebase Hosting Rest Api. I am not sure why they didn't put it on their official website but I checked today and it works. https://developers.google.com/resources/api-libraries/documentation/firebasehosting/v1beta1/java/latest/com/google/api/services/firebasehosting/v1beta1/FirebaseHosting.Sites.Domains.html
Answer that I've received from Firebase support:
There is no API yet that would allow you to add custom domains, it was
requested as a feature before but unfortunately we have no more
information on that - so for now, only the Console UI allows you to do
it.
When it comes to the limits, in a project, a custom domain is
attached to a site - there can be 36 sites per project, and for one
site there is no hard limit, but we recommend not exceeding 20 custom
domains. You can experience technical issues with SSL certs when you
exceed 20 domains per site, which we won’t be able to troubleshoot
since the system was not designed for such use cases.
My organization set up Cloud SQL as the default for Google App Maker about one month ago. In the last week, we have been unable to preview or publish apps that use Cloud SQL data sources, including the sample applications which worked perfectly before. The failure occurs during the authorization process. When previewing or publishing an app, Google App Maker displays a dialog stating "Deploying this app requires authorization". Next it prompts the user for their Google account and then requests approval for the necessary authorizations (e.g., "Manage the data in your Google SQL Service instances"). After approving the authorization, the prompts to authorize begin over with the dialog stating "Deploying this app requires authorization".
Observations:
We have repeated this problem on multiple different computers, networks, and four different user accounts.
In the SQL cloud console, our Cloud SQL instance shows new databases being created for each app along with new database-specific user accounts
All of the databases appear as expected when I log directly into the Cloud SQL database using phpMyAdmin
Other apps which don't use a Cloud SQL datasource work fine, including an app that uses a calculated data source which is hosted in the same Cloud SQL instance
The only errors in the Stack driver logs for the Cloud SQL database showed "INFO" level communication errors with the database (aborted connection...Got an error reading communication packets)
I'm unable to find Stack driver logs for the apps because I cannot preview or publish them (either option would provide a link to the Stack driver logs)
There are now approximately 20 databases in our SQL instance (mostly associated with simple app tests) and we have only used 1 GB of 10 GB of space in our SQL instance
I haven't seen any related problems on the Google Issue Tracker for Google App Maker
I'd appreciate any help or suggestions on what to check in order to resolve this issue.
I posted an issue to Google Issue Tracker and Google corrected the problem. They also provided a workaround if this problem happens again.
Here is the response from the Google development team posted on Google Issue Tracker: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/145345198
It's great to hear your up and working again! We are aware of this issue and are working through a longer term fix. The specific bug appears to be related to some changes made in the Google Cloud session policy control that may have rolled out to your domain recently interacting with AppMaker in a way that was not expected. We've spent time diagnosing the underlying issue and we beleive we know the root cause. I suspect your domain admin did a version of the workaround below.
Without getting too far into the details, the specific bug is that for a Deployer of an AppMaker application, if the Google Cloud Session policy is set with any expiration time, the returned token AppMaker sees is invalid, triggering a loop in AppMaker trying to generate a valid security token. Historically, these session tokens never expired but recently there was beta feature launch that allowed domain admins to set them to expire. We strongly suspect your domain recently set this expiration policy explicitly and that's what is causing the bug.
The good news is that these policies are overridable per Organizational Unit and we have tested that OUs which have the original classic Never Expire setting do, in fact, allow AppMaker to work.
My suspicion is that your domain admin has reverted recent, local changes to your organizational policy under the admin.google.com console, specifically under Security > Google Cloud session control (Beta).
If this happens again, here the workaround we would recommend. Note you don't need to do this if you're currently up and working. You will need the help of someone with admin.gogole.com powers, specifically User and Organizational Unit powers at your organization. It is a slight increase in security risk but it restores some classic behavior that was standard until recently.
The summary of the workaround is to override the Google Cloud session control expiration setting such that individuals who need access to AppMaker deployments can have it. To mitigate systemic security risk, this is best done by creating a limited purpose Organizational Unit with just that setting different than the parent OU settings.
The workaround is to:
Contact someone in your domain with Admin powers for your Google for Business license.
Have your admin proceed to https://admin.google.com. The actions below need to be performed by a domain admin.
Under the Users section, identify the specific user account that needs the ability to deploy AppMaker Apps.
Identify the Organizational Unit of that Appmaker dev user and make a note of it.
Under the Organization Units settings, locate the Organization Unit you identified above.
Create a new Organization Unit underneath that user's current Organizational Unit with some descriptive identifying it as special w.r.t AppMaker. So for Developers, make something like DevelopersWhoAreAlsoAppMakerDevs.
Back under the Users tab, locate the user from step 3. Move this user into the new Organizational Unit you've just created. This change can take a while to propagate.
-Interlude- At this point, you've made a new Organizational Unit for just that individual and added them to it. You can certainly add multiple people to that OU, especially if they're already in the same parent OU. Use your discretion as to what amount of Organizational rework you wish to pursue. You may not be using OUs at all or you may decide to just turn off this control for the whole domain. It's up to you.
Under admin.google.com's Security settings, locate the Google Cloud session control (beta) settings.
Under this panel, from the dropdown menu on the left, locate the Organization Unit you just created.
Be sure to select ONLY the OU you intend to change.
Change the "Google Cloud Console and Google Cloud SDK session control" from expiring to "Session Never Expires".
Save your changes.
The account you selected in step 3 should now be able to deploy AppMaker apps.
It appears this OU change is only necessary for the deployer of an AppMaker app, not an individual user. Note also that if you have multiple AppMaker developers who all have different current OU settings, you may need to create multiple daughter OUs to avoid a sudden radical shift in OU settings for an individual account.
I'm curious how redundant Firebase is? When I write database to Firebase is it automatically replicated to multiple data centers/servers?
I noticed if I go to http://status.firebase.com/, there is a list of servers (?) called s-dal5-nss-XX. Not sure what these exactly mean or how to find out which one of these your application resides on.
More information would be great!
Thank you!
how to find out which one of these your application resides on
From a discussion on the Firebase mailing list:
You can monitor https://.firebaseio.com/.settings/owner.json to find out what server is currently handling requests for your Firebase app. Note that whilst this is a method of getting the current hostname your Firebase is under, Firebase apps are not guaranteed to stay on the same server - configurations can (and do) change as we add or remove servers from rotation or load balance as necessary.