So I have set the location of my Firestore database to asia-south-1, let suppose now I start getting users from the US as well as from India, how will I serve both the groups with lower latency?
You can't change the properties of your project once it's set up, nor even simply pay more for better service. If you want improved service in different regions, you will need to buy computing resources in each of those regions. This requires setting up multiple projects, with each Firestore product configured for the region you want improved service. Note that not all Firebase and GCP products are available in all regions.
If you want all users in all regions to be using the same set of data with improved latency, that's not possible to configure. You will have to build a way to mirror data between the different projects. There is nothing terribly easy about that, nor are there any existing solutions offered by Firebase or GCP to do this for you.
Doug nailed it for Firestore. So 👍
Note that Firebase's Realtime Database (unlike Firestore) can have multiple databases per project, which means you can set up a database instances in each region (it support three right now) and redirect your user's traffic to the region closest to them. You may still have to replicate data between the database instances, similar to Doug's answer, but (unlike in Doug's answer) with Realtime Database this can happen within a single project.
The problem I'm experiencing is high cost of bandwidth usage on a multi regional us bucket. Can anyone explain what this cost corresponds to? This Firebase Storage service is used for hosting asset files therefore the only operation that is required by the end user is downloading.
Additionally cost for Upload ops/Download ops/Bytes stored are practically non existent from what I see in Firebase Console.
Thanks
The main reason for a higher cost was that I had my assets stored in an additional bucket that I've created aside of the default one. As it turns out when you're utilizing additional buckets the different pricing schema is applied. Brief information in this regards can be found in Firebase pricing page under ? icon corresponding to Firebase Storage entry.
This is the estimated pricing for common usage. Firebase Storage free
limits are enforced daily and refreshed at midnight Pacific Time. In
the Blaze plan, fees for Firebase Storage are based on usage volume.
Firebase Storage usage fees are processed as Google Cloud App Engine
usage fees for the default bucket, and Google Cloud Storage usage fees
for any additional buckets. For more information, see pricing for
Google Cloud App Engine and Storage.
Additionally, prior to my current implementation of assets cloud fetching, I had it done via publicly accessible HTTP protocol (there are many Youtube clips which "teach" this approach). I'm not quite sure but that might've had an impact on a pricing schema as well (it's a little bit too convoluted reading Google's documentation in this regards and understanding all the terminology). On top of that this approach presented security threat as the urls were publicly accessible to anyone - in order to prevent it one should always think of some kind of authorization mechanism.
I'm working on a product which for legal reasons needs to store user data in a specific region.
I'm using Firebase so I created a project selecting the region it needs to be in however looking at firestore where the user data is kept I can't find anything pinpointing the region the data actually is. The thing which makes me worry the most is the Cloud Functions endpoints start with us-central1 but obviously that could just be that cloud functions don't exist in the specified region.
Given this is an important matter is there a way to confirm the location of data and even force it to be in a specific region?
Update
Cloud Firestore supports the following regional GCP resource locations, in addition to the 2 multi-region (nam5, eur3) locations:
See the documentation for an up-to-date list of locations.
Original Answer
Cloud Firestore is currently only available in our US multi-region (Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina). As we approach GA we plan to roll it out to multiple locations across the globe and you'll be able to select which one at creation time. Not something you can do today though.
I'm working on a product which for legal reasons needs to store user data in a specific region.
I'm using Firebase so I created a project selecting the region it needs to be in however looking at firestore where the user data is kept I can't find anything pinpointing the region the data actually is. The thing which makes me worry the most is the Cloud Functions endpoints start with us-central1 but obviously that could just be that cloud functions don't exist in the specified region.
Given this is an important matter is there a way to confirm the location of data and even force it to be in a specific region?
Update
Cloud Firestore supports the following regional GCP resource locations, in addition to the 2 multi-region (nam5, eur3) locations:
See the documentation for an up-to-date list of locations.
Original Answer
Cloud Firestore is currently only available in our US multi-region (Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina). As we approach GA we plan to roll it out to multiple locations across the globe and you'll be able to select which one at creation time. Not something you can do today though.
I am now developing a social application. But recently I noticed that Firebase is blocked in China. So I want to make sure whether firebase can be used in China?
* EDIT 24 January 2020 *
Some of the information here might be out of date.
Firebase has a China service at https://firebase.google.cn/ which is not blocked in the PRC. (Thanks to #c-an for bringing this up.)
That said, *.google.com and *.googleapis.com are still blocked in China. I'll change/update this as I get more information.
Original Answer
For now Firebase is blocked and can't be used in China, along with other Google services, because the PRC has blocked all URIs with *.google.com and *.googleapis.com.
This also means, for example, that the Play app store can't be accessed from China. If you don't know what's going on between Google and the PRC, here's a primer.
Also, according to Chinese law, user data of Chinese citizens must be stored inside of the PRC. You might be able to get away with only addressing this once you have a significant number of users, but the trend has been for the CCP to crack down more and more on foreign information, even busting VPNs and declaring them illegal despite complaints of academics who say that they need, you know, real information.
As we're now in the run-up to the 19th Party Congress this autumn, we can expect the situation to get worse before it gets better. Maybe 2018 will leave room for relaxation?
For now, very sadly, forget anything Google in China, and be prepared to store user data of PRC citizens on servers located inside the Great Firewall. Also be prepared for seemingly random degradations of your service within China, or to be blocked altogether, along with these other blocked services.
Update 2017-11-23: The 19th Party Congress has come and gone and, if anything, Google services look less likely than ever to become available in China. The great firewall is likely to continue to be strengthened as the Chinese Communist Party extends its role into corporations, and foreign firms are generally disadvantaged.
Update 2018-08-05: Google plans to open a censored version of its search in China, according to leaked documents. It seems reasonable to assume that if a censored Google Search becomes available in the PRC, then Firebase and other Google Cloud products may as well. The censored search plan, code-named Dragonfly, has reportedly been in the works since December 2017, possibly a result of meetings that month between Google CEO Sundar Pichai and an unnamed top Chinese official when they met at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China, where PRC General Secretary and President Xi Jinping gave a speech.
Update 2018-12-23: It appears that Google's Project Dragonfly is now on hold if not outright abandoned. This implies that the outlook for Firebase in China has worsened.
You can build your own Rest API server outside of China, and make the server talks to Firebase rest api endpoints of Realtime db or Authentication, https://firebase.google.com/docs/reference/rest/database. So you web app talks to your rest api server (accessible from China), and your rest api server talks to Firebase.
The answer is NO :
Using a huge part of Firebase services, I contacted the support, this is the answer :
I'm glad you are considering Firebase for your project. However, in
accordance with current U.S. policies, it is not possible to use
Firebase from within certain countries. For more information about
these restrictions, please refer to the U.S. Department of the
Treasury website. The current list is of blocked countries is listed
here. If you have end-users located within China, it's quite difficult
to access Firebase there since the use of Firebase requires Google
Play Services, which most of the devices in China don't have. We
understand that access to our products has been problematic from
within mainland China. We believe it may have been caused by
networking conditions in China, rather than Google's own services.
Since access to services is determined by the respective country's
government and they don't report to Google, the Transparency Report is
the most authoritative it can be.
I just tested and I am able to access my realtime database hosted on the Singapore region in China mainland. No need to modify anything. Whatever works overseas, works in China. Tested in Beijing.
Facing the same problem, if you are in china, install Astrill VPN and change from openweb to StealthVPN, connect to a server like USA for china one and login to firebase. It will work successfully.