Google 云平台和 Firebase 存储之间有什么联系？

Question

I am trying to have media data somewhere on the cloud and download them by my Android app. I found out that this should be done by the Google cloud platform.

But when I started to investigate I learned that I need to have Firebase storage first. But do I still need the Cloud platform then? Isn't it the same thing?

To be honest I don't understand the difference between these two.

So what is the difference and connection between the Google cloud platform and Firebase storage? And how do they cooperate?

Answer 1

Google Cloud Platform is a group of over 100 cloud based products offered by Google. Instead of covering that, I'm going to assume you are asking about Google Cloud Storage , which is one of those 100+ products, and which deals with storing and retrieving files.

Cloud Storage has a set of APIs that you can call from a trusted environment, such as your development machine, a server that you control, or a serverless environment like Cloud Functions. It does not offer SDKs for direct access from client-side platforms such as Android.

Firebase is also part of Google, and is a so-called serverless platform: it offers SDKs that can be used directly within your client-side application code. In this specific scenario, Firebase offers SDKs that access Cloud Storage from Android, iOS and Web clients.

To allow you to secure access to the files in Cloud Storage, Firebase relies on authenticating the user , and then a set of server-side security rules that you configure and that define who can access what files .

This combination of accessing Cloud Storage through Firebase is officially called Cloud Storage for Firebase, but often still referred to by its previous name of Firebase Storage.