Firestore: The NoSQL Serverless Database for the Application Developer

The recent years have seen an explosive growth in web and mobile application development. Such applications typically have rapid development cycles, and their developers expect mobile-friendly features and serverless characteristics such as rapid deployment capabilities (with minimal initialization), scalability to handle workload spikes, and flexible pay-as-you-go billing. Google’s Firestore is a NoSQL serverless database with real-time notification capability, and together with the Firebase ecosystem greatly simplifies common app development challenges by letting application developers focus primarily on their business logic and user experience. This paper presents the Firestore architecture, how it satisfies the aforementioned requirements, and how its real-time notification system works in tandem with Firebase client libraries to allow mobile applications to provide a smooth user experience even in the presence of network connectivity issues.