Firebase Authentication is a service Google provides as a wrapper for the GCP authentication and authorization services. It’s commonly used in both full-stack React development as well as full-stack Angular development. Let’s discuss Firebase Authentication and why you may want to use it.
An Overview of Firebase Authentication
In this video, CBT Nuggets trainer Shaun Wassell explains what Firebase Authentication is — and how it works.
Ready to Learn Firebase Authentication?
Are you ready to dive deeper into Firebase Authentication and learn how to integrate it into your full-stack React development process? Shaun Wassell’s Firebase Authentication tutorial is a great place to start.
Shaun will teach you how to use Firebase Authentication in less than an hour. Yes, this course can easily be completed casually over a weekend. Sign up for a 7-day free trial and start watching the training today!
What is Firebase Authentication?
In the app world, user management is a complicated subject. There are a lot of components in user management services that blur the lines between each other. Here’s what you need to consider.
1. All users need to be authenticated. Anytime a user logs into your application, you need to verify who they say they are. This typically comes in the form of a username and password, though other authentication mechanisms exist, too.
2. All users need to be authorized to use different parts of your application. After a user logs into your app, every time they make a request to your API, the API needs to verify that the user is allowed to access that endpoint. The most straightforward example of this is proving that a user is an administrator and is allowed to reset someone else’s password.
3. User information needs to be secure both in transit and at rest. That way, if someone steals your user’s information via a man-in-the-middle attack or exfiltrating data from your database, attackers won’t be able to understand their personal information.
All three of those components are very difficult to get right. That’s what Firebase Authentication is. Firebase Authentication is a service provided by Google that serves as a wrapper for GCP user management services.
In this case, Google handles those components mentioned above, and Firebase makes it easy to integrate GCP’s user management functions into applications.
Why You Should Use Firebase Auth
There are many reasons you should use Firebase Authentication. It’s popular with the full-stack React development crowd for a reason. Let’s go over the high points.
First and foremost, Firebase Authentication is free. Go visit the full-stack Angular development sub-Reddit or any other dev-focused forum. It’s recommended more than any other authentication service in most development forums.
Firebase Authentication is easy to integrate into applications. Google offers support for a variety of different languages and frameworks. Whether you’re integrating Firebase Auth into React, Vue, Angular, or Swift, it’s easy.
Most importantly, though, Firebase Authentication is secure. Security is hard, so offloading user authentication and authorization services to specialized vendors is a routine practice.
Firebase Authentication handles securing user information at rest in Google’s databases. Google is well-versed in securing data at rest. They can manage database security better than most organizations. For small teams, this is a no-brainer. Let the big dogs handle user security for you.
Likewise, Firebase Auth handles authorization. Authorization is typically handled by issuing a JSON web token to users after they log in to an app or website. Understanding and building a system to sign and manage JSON web tokens isn’t complex. However, it’s still a lot of work. Handling JWTs has a lot of moving parts. Firebase does this for you, too.
One of the benefits of leaning on Google for security is that you can leverage Google’s knowledge in things like OAuth, SSO, OpenID, etc. The engineers at Google had input in defining some of these authentication specifications. They know them inside and out.
Final Thoughts
So, you might be wondering if there are downsides to using Google’s Firebase Auth service. Not everything in Firebase Auth is free. For instance, if you want to provide 2FA via SMS, you’ll need to pay some nominal fees.
It’s not as hard to budget GCP expenses compared to AWS or Azure. However, it’s easy to fall into some of the same traps. If you are unfamiliar with GCP services, check out a Firebase Authentication tutorial the first couple of times you implement it. That way, you can identify some of those pitfalls — and what to watch out for.
