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Coming from Firebase
Firebase is Google's backend-as-a-service, running entirely on Google's infrastructure with usage-based pricing. Here's how to move your backend to a server you own.
Why teams leave Firebase
Firebase is a fast way to ship a mobile or web app backend without managing a server. The friction shows up as usage grows: Firestore reads and writes, Cloud Functions invocations and bandwidth are all billed separately, and the bill can become hard to predict.
Railyard runs your backend as a normal server process on a flat price per team, with Postgres, MySQL or Redis as a managed addon.
What comes with you
- Your backend logic, rewritten to run as a standard app on a Dockerfile, buildpacks, or a Procfile, instead of as Cloud Functions.
- Your environment variables and secrets.
- Firestore data, exported and migrated into a relational schema on a managed Postgres addon.
- Firebase Auth users, exportable and importable into your own auth system or a library.
The move
- Attach a server: an existing one, or a new one Railyard provisions in your cloud account.
- Add your repo and attach the Postgres, MySQL or Redis addon your app needs.
- Migrate your data out of Firestore into your new schema.
- Deploy to a temporary URL. Run your release task and verify.
- Move DNS. There is no outage; Firebase keeps serving until the cutover.
What’s different
A flat price per team instead of per-read, per-write and per-invocation billing, and a server you can reason about instead of a collection of managed services.