BaaS ?

is that like serverless ?

more like Parse, Firebase

I work at an agency and Firebase / Firestore is the first thing we reach for clients that are small startups or have no existing product or team to maintain it. The features it offers and the ease of development make it a no-brainer to sell and implement, it ends up being much quicker to bring the thing to market. For similar reasons, if I were starting a new side project, it’d be the first thing I reach for.

Firebase sometimes gets a bad rep among backend eng I’ve found, but it’s perfect for the thing it was built for - shipping something. It also scales to 100k concurrents out of the box, which is probably an order of magnitude better than whatever you could hand-roll as an individual.

BaaS -- Backend as a Service presumably @fabrao? I had to look that up -- I'd never heard of it.

GCP seems to be heavily invested in it as well, continuing to add new products under the “Firebase” brand, e.g. SMS phone authentication was a recent acquisition from Twitter Digits.

Aside from the client side features like offline and real time support, one of the big wins for us has been the ability to fire a Google Cloud Function (AWS Lambda) on a database change - that’s usually the kind of thing you need to introduce pub/sub or an event queue to do.

I attended Google Next (Cloud) last year. Might attend again this year. Their image/video analysis services are very impressive. We pretty much only use their Maps stuff but the whole Google ecosystem is fascinating -- and it's clear they're going after the enterprise now, trying to compete head-on with Amazon.

Their platform arch. seems a bit simpler to understand than, say, AWS, though with less leverage and fine-grained control

If I were to try experimenting with a cloud project, I'd turn to GCP first, then AWS for production, most likely

Code is not very portable between them, unfortunately.