Google Announces Cloud Functions for Firebase

Google Cloud Next 2017 is happening this week, and we've seen the company announce a number of new features and services for Google Cloud users at the event. There's been some unique announcements, such as introducing a new API to apply machine learning identification to videos, along with a huge update for current Firebase customers. Google's Cloud Functions for Firebase goes against the tradition of using mostly client code in an application, and expands it to the cloud so some functions can be easier.

Keeping most of the code on the client side of things does make it quicker and less expensive (generally) to ship an application to the end user. This functionality is limited though, and can sometimes still require you to have your own server for various tasks. So along with what Firebase has already been offering to keep things local, now you also have the choice to add some cloud functionality by utilizing Google Cloud and its massive server farms.

Cloud Functions for Firebase will be included in all of Firebase's pricing plans, and free tier users will still be able to experiment with it to see if it's a good fit for their needs. Google didn't go into detail about everything you can do with Cloud Functions for Firebase, but they did give a few examples. So, with Firebase Analytics, you could send a coupon code via a notification to a user once they have just completed a purchase. Or you could request your end user to fill out a survey once they have updated their application.

With Firebase Authentication, you could send a welcome email to new users, and even clean up data from your Realtime Database that's associated with a user once they delete their account. Speaking of Realtime Database, you can send a notification using FCM when data is written to the database and moderate or remove abusive language that was just written to the database as well. There are a ton of different things you can do and Google even came up with a video to explain it even further.

Source: The Firebase Blog

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