Using Realtime Database and Firestore together

Question

I want to use firestore in my app due to the scaling limit being 1 million concurrent connections. I have found the pricing to be quite high especially when compared with the real time database, but cannot use this as it only scales to around 200k.

I was wondering whether I could use firestore which will be directly accessed on the client side for some of my data that will need live document listeners and use the realtime data for storing larger chunks of data which will be queried indirectly using firebase functions.

My question is:

if the only way to read/write the realtime database is through a cloud function which is called by the client side, will this only count as 1 concurrent connection as the client side is not directly connected to it?

Thank you

Answer 1

but cannot use [Realtime Database] as it only scales to around 200k.

Keep in mind that this is per database instance. On a paid project, you can create additional database instances to scale much further (even beyond the 1m concurrents that Firestore supports), as long as you are able/willing to define how to distribute your users over the database instances (commonly referred to as a "sharding strategy").

On your actual question: each Cloud Functions instance counts as a single connection to the database. Keep in mind here that Cloud Functions auto-scale, so you will have as many connections from Cloud Functions as you have concurrently running Cloud Functions instances. So while it may well be more than a single connection, it is extremely unlikely you'll reach the limit of 200K connections through this means.