[mbleigh]

The Firebase Realtime Database has been around for ~5 years (and is still fully supported after this launch).

Cloud Datastore has been around in some form (started as App Engine Datastore) since 2008.

Cloud Firestore was a massive multi-year joint effort between Firebase and Google Cloud. Google is investing heavily in both, and this is a big deal for our teams.

[mjw1007]

Perhaps you could consider persuading the powers that be to make a loud public commitment.

After all, if they are truly confident, there should be little cost in doing so.

[mbleigh]

We announced the product, that's a loud public commitment. Once it reaches general availability, it will be covered by the Cloud deprecation policy requiring a minimum of one year notice for deprecation.

I'm not sure what other guarantees would even make sense to offer. If anything, I'd look at this announcement as ongoing proof in the magnitude of investment Google is making in Firebase and Cloud.

[Cthulhu_]

I'd guess a forward commitment, like a LTS version? That would probably have an adverse effect though, since you'd be the only provider that goes (e.g.) "We will support this product for at least three years from now", implying (to people making Decisions) you'd pull the plug after three years.

Maybe publish a long term (5+ year) plan / roadmap? idk.

[mbleigh]

Yeah, unfortunately this is pretty much an unsolvable problem.

Roadmaps are subject to change and even more subject to be delayed, publishing them tends to disappoint more than reassure. If we gave a forward commitment the questions would just be "why not longer?" or "what happens in X + 1 years?".

All we can do is say what I'm saying now: we stand behind this product 100%, we think it solves real problems for developers, and we really hope people will try it out and find it useful.

I get the doubt, truly I do. But Google's incentives are clearly aligned with Cloud Firestore's success: if you folks use it and grow your app to be successful, we make money. If you use it and really like it, you're more likely to use Firebase and Cloud's other products, which will make us even more money.

[ChicagoBoy11]

>if you folks use it and grow your app to be successful, we make money. If you use it and really like it, you're more likely to use Firebase and Cloud's other products,

the issue is the inverse is also true: If you folks don't use it, we don't make money, and we deploy these resources elsewhere. See Parse