Google's Cloud Firestore is now generally available
Google on Thursday announced that Cloud Firestore, its cloud-native NoSQL database, is now out of beta and in General Availability. Google is also lowering prices for regional instances of Cloud Firestore and adding new locations to host Cloud Firestore data.
Bringing the fully-managed database into GA should help organizations that want to embrace serverless application development. Amazon Web Services introduced serverless computing with AWS Lambda and offers database services like Amazon Aurora Serverless and Amazon DynamoDB, where serverless is core to the design. Meanwhile, MongoDB has its Stitch serverless offering for its Atlas cloud service.
Cloud Firestore is integrated with both the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Firebase, Google's mobile development platform. It makes it simple to store, sync, and query data for web, mobile, and IoT applications. While in beta, companies including The New York Times and the scooter-sharing business Skip Scooters were using Cloud Firestore to build app experiences.
Now that it's in GA, Cloud Firestore is included in GCP's official Service Level Agreements, guaranteeing 99.999% uptime for multi-region instances and 99.99% for regional instances. Moving out of beta also means that GCP's deprecation policy officially applies to Cloud Firestore and that Cloud Firestore is included among Google services that support HIPAA compliance.
Most regional instances -- which are hosted in a single region and thus not as reliable as multi-region -- will be lower priced starting on March 3. In some locations, the price will be as low as 50 percent of multi-region instance prices.
Google is also adding 10 new locations for hosting Cloud Firestore data, including a new multi-region location in Europe.
Google is also adding a "Usage" tab in the Firebase console to help customers handle costs. It will show customers exactly how many reads, writes, and deletes their database has received over time.