Firebase: Cloud Storage

Cloud Storage is built for application developers who need to store and serve user-generated content, usually big files like photos or videos. It is mostly used or developed for photos and videos, but we might use this for other things like text files.

A powerful, cost-effective, and simple object storage service built to scale:

1. Google security, when uploading or downloading files from our firebase apps.
2. We can store images, audio, video, or other user-generated content.
3. We can use Google Cloud Storage to access the same files on the server.

It is a technology which allows for storing and managing various media content generated by mobile app users. It is a cloud computing model which stores data on the internet through a cloud computing provider who manages and operates data storage as a service. It is delivered on-demand with just-in-time costs and capacity. It eliminates buying and managing our own data storage infrastructure. It provides us agility, durability, global scale with "anywhere, anytime" data access.

Key capabilities

Firebase Cloud Storage is capable of performing the following things:

Robust Operations

Reliability is one of the biggest advantages of the Cloud Firestore. Firebase SDKs perform uploads and downloads regardless of network quality. Downloads and uploads both are robust. Robust means from where it stopped, will restart from there, and save the user time and bandwidth.

Strong security

For providing simple and intuitive authentication to the developer, Firebase SDKs for Cloud Storage integrate with Firebase Authentication. For allowing access based on filename, size, content type, and other metadata, we can use declarative security model.

High Scalability

Cloud Storage is built for the Exabyte scale when our app goes viral. Easily grow from prototype to production using the same structure that powers Spotify and Google Photos.

How does it work?

Cloud storage is purchased from third-party cloud vendors that own and operate data storage capacity and distribute it over the internet in a pay-as-you-go model. These cloud storage vendors manage security, capacity, and stability to make data accessible to our applications worldwide.

Applications use cloud storage through traditional storage protocols or directly through an API. Many vendors provide complementary services designed to help collect, secure, manage, and analyze data on a large scale.

Cloud Storage stores our files in the Google Cloud Storage bucket and makes them accessible through both Firebase and Google Cloud. It allows us to upload and download files from mobile clients through the Firebase SDKs, and perform server-side processing such as image filtering or video transcoding using the Google Cloud Platform. Cloud Storage scales automatically. It means that there is no need to migrate to any other provider.

Firebase Cloud Storage is a powerful yet easy-to-use tool for storing all types of objects. With its help, we can store videos, images, audio, and other types of user content. Firebase Cloud Storage allows us to easily switch from app prototyping to a complete product, thanks to its ability to be highly-scalable and process exabytes of data.