5 uses for Cloud Functions | Get to know Cloud Firestore #12

On this episode of Get to know Cloud Firestore, we’ll dig into some common patterns for using Cloud Functions and think about how you might want to use them in your own apps. Make sure to subscribe and stay tuned for more content from Firebase!

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:46 Simplifying security rules
4:50 Keeping denormalized data in sync
7:26 Routine database maintenance
9:38 Running Firestore on top of a legacy database
13:56 Building a custom API
17:57 Tradeoffs of using callable Cloud Functions
19:08 Outro

product_area: Firebase; product: Firebase - Cloud Firestore; fullname: Todd Kerpelman; re_ty: Premiere;

[cindysi]

Todd’s a legend. Informative and entertaining.

[jace]

Cloud functions are also a great way to hide privileged API keys from clients. Your client makes a request to the cloud function, your cloud function then verifies the client and user and formats a request to a 3rd party service using credentials that you want to keep hidden from clients.

[_mono]

‪0:48 #1 Simplifying security rules‬
‪4:55 #2 Syncing denormalized data‬
‪7:30 #3 Routine maintenance‬
‪9:40 #4 Running on top of a legacy database‬
‪14:00 #5 Build a custom API‬

[averagehelper]

It’s a joy working with Cloud Functions. We use them all the time in my company’s projects, and it’s been great to keep our Firestore rules manageable. And when things go wrong 😅 it’s super easy to publish a fix so all of our clients can start using the new code almost immediately.

[overnightmares]

I wish I could work with this guy one day. He explains things so clearly. He seems like he can be a very good mentor.

[blocky]

His stickers on his laptop are fabulous

[kevinkumar]

We need a video about caching. I as a beginner struggle a lot to figure out how you can save reads of data which is constantly queried. Thanks for the other tutorials tho, which helped a lot

[sutikshnadubey]

Keep those humor snippets coming. We developers are sad lot, we need them :)

[cristianberroeta]

There are great patterns and ideas about Cloud Funtions in the video Todd, thanks!

I'm also using Cloud Functions to:
- populate my Firestore database (with some constants), and
- to apply Firestore "schema" (or data) migrations consistently across multiple environments (development, staging, and production). That also allows me to easily have the migration documented, as the Cloud Function file is included in the project's git repository

[EstebanCodes]

I've use cloud functions to setup an admin api to my dashboard app (the app that controls my real client app) that can query and write everything without worrying about security rules

[AkhilKumar-ysph]

What are the big websites that are using cloud firestore as a backend

[JananiNayanathara]

just finished the whole series. love this guy.. 💌

[Ondal]

Still missing a good tutorial on testing cloud functions locally using the emulator. In former videos Google has suggested TypeScript as the preferred way of creating cloud functions, but all examples and semi-tutorials seem to be plain javascript. My direct problem is testing indirect changes, where a function updates another collection. For instance a user updating their name, and this has an effect on review names as in the restaurant on going domain.

[puruvijay]

That laptop skin is from Spirited Away!!

You are awesome Todd Kerpelman

[rubenheymans]

This video is awesome! Learned a lot, got some work flows confirmed, thanks!

[rubenheymans]

A video on multi tenancy would be nice too 😊

[fredericrebel]

Would add that having multiple triggers available for a CF is very usefull to ensure Correctness. As it became very straightforward/easy to schedule/run Correctness check batches against same code used by our front-end

[Tettoffensive]

One issue that I've run into with using cloud functions for denormalized data is that I still end up having to make changes in my write function on the client to keep certain data in sync that is visible to the user. Otherwise, it can look like whatever the change the user made was not successful until the cloud function syncs all the data back up and the client fetches the new data. Are there any strategies for dealing with this in a clean way? I feel like I end up with a lot of spaghetti code keeping everything in sync.

[mehulbisht]

what an awesome session ! enjoyed it with Todd in live chat !

[ijneklim]

I'm using cloud functions to detect doc change to perform certain operations. But it seems the cloud functions miss some of the operation due to high numbers of invocations. I doubt the reliability of cloud functions... 🤔