Google beefs up Firebase platform for the enterprise

Today at the Firebase Summit in Prague, Google announced a number of updates to its Firebase app development platform designed to help it shift from an environment for individuals or small teams into a full-blown enterprise development tool.

Google acquired Firebase 4 years ago to help developers connect to key cloud tools like a database or storage via a set of software development kits (SDKs). Over time, it has layered on sophisticated functionality like monitoring to fix performance issues and access to analytics to see how users are engaging with the app, among other things. But the toolkit hasn’t necessarily been geared towards larger organizations until now.

“[Today’s announcements] are going to be around a set of features and updates that are catered more towards enterprises and sophisticated app teams that are looking to build and grow their mobile apps,” Francis Ma, head of product at Firebase told TechCrunch.

Perhaps the biggest piece of news was that they were adding corporate support. While the company boasts 1.5 million apps per month running on Firebase, in order to move deeper into the enterprise, it needed to have a place corporate IT could call when they run into issues. That is coming with the company expected to announce various support packages in Beta by the end of the year. These will be tied to broader Google Cloud Platform support.

“With this launch, if you already have a paid GCP Support package, you will be able to get your Firebase questions answered through the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Support Console. Once the change is fully launched, Firebase support will be included at no additional charge with paid GCP Support packages, which includes target response times, a dedicated technical account manager (if you are enrolled in Enterprise Support) and more,” Ma explained in a blog post.

In addition, larger teams and organizations need more management tools and the company announced the Firebase Management API. This allows programmatic access to manage project workflows from IDE to Firebase. Ma says this includes direct integration with StackBlitz and Glitch, two web-based IDEs. “Their platforms will now automatically detect when you are creating a Firebase app and allow you to deploy to Firebase Hosting with the click of a button, without ever leaving their platforms,” Ma wrote.

There were a bushel of other announcements including access to better facial recognition tools in the Google ML kit announced last spring. There were also improvements to Crashlytics performance monitoring, which includes integration with PagerDuty now, and Firebase Predictions, its analytics tool, which is now generally available after graduating from Beta.

All of these announcements and more, are part of a maturation of the Firebase platform as Google aims to move it from a tool aimed directly at developers to one that can be integrated at the enterprise level.