Cloud Storage for Firebase inherits advantages or features from Google Cloud Storage. However, it has some additional features, such as declarative security rule language, to specify security rules.
The key features of Cloud Storage are as follows:
- Ease of use and Robustness: Cloud storage for Firebase is a simple and powerful solution to store and retrieve the user-generated content such as documents, photos, audio, or videos. It provides robust upload and download capabilities so that file transfers get paused when internet connectivity drops and resume from where they were left when it is connected again. It saves time as well as your internet bandwidth. The API for Cloud storage is also easy and can be used through the use of Firebase SDK.
- Powerful Security: When it comes to storage in the cloud, the first thing we think about is the security. Is it secure enough? What will happen to my documents? Such questions are obvious and important also. The answer to that is yes, Cloud storage for Firebase is very much secure. It has the power of Google security. It is integrated with Firebase authentication to provide intuitive authentication for developers. You can also use declarative security rules to restrict access to the files based on the content type, name, or some other attributes.
- High Scalability: Cloud storage for Firebase is backed by Google infrastructure, which provides a highly scalable storage environment so that you can easily scale your applications from prototypes to productions. This infrastructure already backs the most popular and high traffic applications, such as Youtube, Google photos, and Spotify.
- Cost effective: Cloud storage is a cost-effective solution where you just pay for what you use. You don't need to purchase and maintain a server for hosting files.
- Integrates well with other Firebase products: Cloud storage integrates well with other Firebase products, for example, in our last chapter, we have seen that Cloud storage triggers can trigger the Cloud functions that can execute some logic based on the file operation on Cloud storage.
We have seen the key features and advantages of Cloud Storage for Firebase. Let's see how it actually works.