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I am looking to use GCP for a micro-services application. After comparing AWS and GCP I have decided to go with Google because one major requirement for the project is to schedule tasks to run in the future (Cloud Tasks) which AWS does not seem to offer an equivalent of.
I am planning on containerizing my services and deploying to GCP using Cloud Run with a Redis cluster running as well for caching.
I understand that you cannot have multiple Firestore instances running in one project. Does this mean that all if my services will be using the same database?
I was looking to follow a model (possible on AWS) where each service had its own database instance that it reached out to.
Is this pattern possible on GCP?
2
Answers
Firestore indeed is for the moment limited to a single database instance per project. For performance that is usually not a problem, but for isolation such as your use-case, that can indeed be a reason to look elsewhere.
Firebase’s original Realtime Database does allow multiple instances per project, and recently added a REST API for provisioning database instances. Since each Google Cloud Project can be toggled to also be a Firebase project, you could consider that.
I don’t know all details of your case. Do you think that you can deploy a "microservice" per project? Not ideal, especially if they are to communicate using PubSub, but may be an option. In that case every "microservice" may get its own Firestore if that is a requirement.
I don’t think one should consider GCP project as some kind of "hard boundaries". For me they are just another level of granularity – in addition to folders, etc.
There might be some benefits for "one microservice – one project" appraoch as well. For example, less dependent lifecycles, better (more accurate) security, may be simpler development workflows…