Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Firestore is a fully managed NoSQL document database service that gives you a scalable, flexible and highly available solution for data storage. The product enables you to build large-scale applications quickly and easily.

✨️ What is Firestore?

Firestore is a NoSQL database that can be used standalone or in conjunction with other GCP products. It's cloud-hosted, so you don't have to worry about managing your own servers or setting up the infrastructure. Firestore also scales well and provides real-time updates to your data, which makes it ideal for use cases like mobile applications, IoT devices and other IoT apps.

Firestore has been designed specifically with performance in mind, offering an impressive 99% read/write availability (ACID) over its entire life cycle—even during write operations! In fact, Firestore was built from the ground up with scalability in mind; it supports snapshots and multi-region deployments so you can scale horizontally as needed without having to worry about any infrastructure issues affecting your application.

🗃️️ Database Structure

Firestore is a NoSQL database, which means it’s not relational in nature. It also means that Firestore doesn't have the same limitations as SQL databases and can handle more complex data structures than they do. In addition to being a distributed database, Firestore is also cloud-native: you don't need to worry about installing anything on your server or setting up any software — all of this happens automatically with Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Firestore was built with speed and scale in mind; this means that you can store huge amounts of data without having to worry about performance issues like latency or memory consumption. You'll only pay for what you use (with no upfront costs), so there's no risk involved!

🎉 Benefits and Key Features

Firestore has a flexible schema, which means you can store whatever data structure works best for your application. This is especially useful when it comes to storing data in real-time or offline with Firebase Real-Time Database (RTDB).

Firestore also offers high availability through its real-time database and EC2 instances, allowing you to scale up as needed without having to worry about downtime. In addition, Firebase's teaming feature allows multiple databases on your instance if needed for higher throughputs or greater reliability.

🔒️ Features

⦿ Real-time synchronization: Data is automatically synchronized across all connected devices in real-time, ensuring that your users always have the most up-to-date information.

⦿ Offline support: Cloud Firestore provides offline support, so your app can continue to work even when the device is not connected to the internet.

⦿ Automatic scaling: Cloud Firestore automatically scales with your users and your data, so you don't have to worry about capacity planning.

⦿ Strong consistency: Cloud Firestore provides strong consistency, so you can be confident that when you write data, it will be immediately available for reading by other devices.

⦿ Flexible data model: Cloud Firestore allows you to store data in the form of documents and collections, and you can nest these collections and documents to create complex data structures.

⦿ Powerful querying: Cloud Firestore provides powerful querying capabilities, so you can retrieve the specific data you need from your database.

🦺️ Security Features

Cloud Firestore provides robust security features, including user authentication, access controls, and encrypted data storage.

⦿ Authentication and authorization

⦿ Encryption

⦿ Permissions

⦿ Role-based access control

💸️ Pricing

The Firebase Cloud Storage (FCS) service is free for up to 1 GB of data storage. You can create up to 100,000 objects in your database, which is plenty for most applications. In addition to storing data locally on your machine, FCS also includes support for remote storage via the Google Cloud Platform– provided you're willing to pay the associated fees.

When it comes time to scale up or down though, there are some costs associated with using GCP Firebase:

• When you want more than 50GB per month: $0.08/month per GB ($2/month on average).

• When you want less than 25GB per month: $0.05/month per GB ($1/month on average).

📝️ Summary

⦿ GCP Firestore is a Google Cloud database product for the NoSQL database.

⦿ Firestore is a Google Cloud database product for NoSQL databases.

⦿ Firestore is a cloud database product that's built on top of the same robust infrastructure as other Google Cloud products like BigQuery and Spanner.

⦿ Firestore supports Document-level encryption (encryption at the document level) - In addition to standard security features such as password protection and read permissions, you can use Firebase Security Rules to enforce stronger protections around sensitive data.

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✍️ About the Author:

Mohamed Fayaz is a Data & AI Consultant, and a technical blogger who writes and speaks about the topics such as Software Engineering, Big Data Analytics, and Cloud Engineering. Connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter for updates.

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