I’m using Google’s Golang SDK for Firestore. The experience is excellent and I’m quikcly becoming a fan of Firestore. However, as a Golang Firestore developer, I’m feeling less loved and some of the concepts in the database were causing me a conundrum. I’m still not entirely certain that I have Timestamps nailed but… I learned an important lesson on the auto-creation of Timestamps in documents and how to retain these values.

I’m working on a project that will programmatically create Google Cloud Run services and I want to be able to dynamically discover these services using Prometheus. This is one solution. NOTE Google Cloud Run is the service I’m using, but the principle described herein applies to any runtime service that you’d wish to use. Why is this challenging? IIUC, it’s primarily because Prometheus has a limited set of plugins for service discovery, see the sections that include _sd_ in Prometheus Configuration documentation.

I was pleased to discover that Google provides a non-Node.JS mechanism to subscribe to and act upon Firestore triggers, Google Cloud Firestore Triggers. I’ve nothing against Node.JS but, for the project i’m developing, everything else is written in Golang. It’s good to keep it all in one language. I’m perplexed that Cloud Functions still (!) only supports Go 1.13 (03-Sep-2019). Even Go 1.14 (25-Feb-2020) was released pre-pandemic and we’re now running on 1.