We are currently have a messaging type solution (it's an add-on to our code business application) in production that uses nodeJS and socket.io (about 3000 users and growing). We've recently started doing some work to make it scalable by having socket messages go through Message Broker to each instance of the node server that hosts the client socket connections.
This past week at a conference we learned about the potential of Firebase Realtime Database to drastically reduce the complexity of supporting a socket infrastructure. Basically for us it could eliminate us having to care about socket connections, and the complexity of scaling, as the client would have a connection to Firebase and get incoming messages directly from it. We also use a 3rd party for web notifications which could also be replaced by Firebase notifications.
On the surface this all sounds magical and a perfect solution for us so we don't have to build and maintain backends to do this and just focus on building apps. We would still have a nodeJS server to serve our content and other business related functions, we would just use Firebase for data storage and real-time delivery.
We are trying to sell this to senior management but they are a little fearful regarding the downsides that we simply don't know about because Firebase is new to us. I would appreciate any thoughts people may have.
via Troy
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