First, What is Firebase?
Firebase is Google Cloud platform developed by Google for creating mobile and web applications. It was originally an independent company founded in 2011. In 2014, Google acquired the platform.
It can be used as the backend for your project as it has a lot of great services like :
Cloud Firestore is a flexible, scalable database for mobile, web, and server development.
Real-time Database is a noSQL database and It's better used in smaller projects.
Hosting you can host your website like that www.example.web.com
Authentication provides ready Authentication backend for login and sign up, You can have a free database with millions of users.
Cloud Storage for storing images and files
Cloud Functions is a hosted, private, and scalable Node.js environment where you can run Backend JavaScript code.
There are a lot of more services for Firebase like Machine learning but we'll stick to what benefits a Frontend Developer.
So, let's go back to our question
Why to learn Firebase as a Frontend Developer?
As a Frontend developer always wants to learn about consuming APIs and read, write, update and delete data so you search for free APIs to train on but you don't have Full Control on the API so Firebase will let you code whatever your idea to make a Full-Stack Application without learning backend.
Firebase has free and paid plans (except Authentication is free )but you can use the free plans for learning and making projects for your portfolio. Here's a link for Firebase Pricing Plans.
Here The Net Ninja you can learn Firebase Stuff from Shaun the owner of the channel.
Twitter: @Amr__Elmohamady
Top comments (6)
Firebase not only provides a great front-end hosting solution, but its cloud function is also pretty good too. I have created an opensource project based on React + Firebase + Stripe, which allows dev to create a SaaS project without worrying user auth and subscription payments. Here is the code: github.com/chaoming/fireact
Firebase provides absolutely amazing free authentication for unlimited users. We use it in pretty much every project.
Yeah, Authentication is free but;
This is the Phone Authentication prices
Free for 10k/month
Phone Auth - US, Canada, and India
$0.01/verification
Phone Auth - All other countries
$0.06/verification
2FA with the text messages is paid everywhere. If it's an absolute must for your project, then you can consider something else. But having the ability to get an auth DB with millions of users for free is mindblowing.
Exactly this is Great!
Firebase is pretty awesome, IMO.