Firebase and cartesian public reads-CodePudding

I'm working on a product that displays the results of running races. Races could have thousands of participants. So, in the days after a medium-sized event, there might be 3000 non-authenticated users wanting to browse 3000 results.

Although not every visitor will view all the results, the maximum damage at 3000 * 3000 would be 9,000,000 reads which at $.06 (Google cloud pricing) would cost $540,000 (Update: I'm a dummy, I missed the "per 100,000 documents" part, so this would only be $540).

Obviously, I wouldn't deliver all 3000 results for each visit - there would be paging and limits. Though, there's something inherently scary about the possibility of those costs.

Questions:

Is firebase simply the wrong technology for this type of product?
Is firebase not really intended for non-authenticated apps? Obviously DDOS becomes a concern for public access and there's no real protection in FB for this.

Every post I've read on these topics assumes developers are building apps for authenticated users.

CodePudding user response：

9,000,000 reads which at $.06 (Google cloud pricing) would cost $540,000

The Firestore pricing of $0.06 is for 100,000 document reads, so 9 million document reads cost $540.

Aside from that: you should model your data in a way that ensures you read the data that the user actually sees. For example, if all users will read the entirety of all 3,000 documents, consider using a data bundle to distribute that to them.

Realistically though it is more likely that each user will read just a subset of the documents, and probably not of all 3,000 documents. So consider if you can combine the part that they'll read into a more cost-efficient structure. For if these were news articles: you could store the headline and intro paragraph of the first 100 articles in a single document, and just read that document (let's call it the frontpage) into each client when it starts.

There are many more ways to model the data, depending on the use-cases of your app. To learn more on how to think about such data modeling, I recommend reading NoSQL data modeling and watching the excellent Get to know Cloud Firestore video series.