Google Cloud Firestore, the serverless, NoSQL document database, is now generally available

Google’s Cloud Firestore is Google’s serverless NoSQL document database used for storing, syncing, and querying data for web, mobile, and IoT applications. It is integrated with both Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Firebase, Google’s mobile development platform. It is now generally available. Apart from this, Cloud Firestore is now available in 10 new locations, making the total region count as 13 with a significant price reduction for regional instances. Firestore had a single location when it was launched and added two more during the beta.

Cloud Firestore is now available in 13 regions

When in beta, Cloud Firestore allowed developers to only use multi-region instances, which were sometimes more expensive and not required by every app. With this launch, Google is giving developers the option to run their databases in a single region.

There is a significant price reduction with as low as 50% of multi-region instance prices. New Cloud Firestore pricing takes effect from March 3, 2019, for most regional instances. Cloud Firestore’s SLA (Service Level Agreement) is also available. 99.999% is available for multi-region instances and 99.99% is available for regional instances.

With Stackdriver integration (in beta), Cloud Firestore users can monitor read, write and delete operations in near-real time with a new "Usage" tab in the Firebase console.

For the next release, Google is working on adding new features including querying for documents across collections and incrementing database values without needing a transaction.

Existing Cloud Datastore users will be live-upgraded to Cloud Firestore automatically later in 2019.

Netizens are generally happy about this release.

https://twitter.com/puf/status/1091030237117206529

A comment on hacker news reads, “Been loving Firestore! It has been my first real experience w/ NoSQL in an MVP to production-ready quickly. It's been SO easy to experiment with and learn. Community has been great.”

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