Google announced Firestore … integration with Eventarc. Ackal uses Firestore to persist Customer and Check information and it uses Google Cloud Firestore Triggers to handle events on these document types. Eventarc feels like the strategic future of eventing in Google Cloud and I’ve been concerned since adopting the technology that Google would abandon Google Cloud Firestore Triggers. For this reason, when I saw last week’s announcement, I thought I should evaluate the mechanism and this blog post is a summary of that work.

Google Cloud Platform Free Tier appears (please verify this for yourself) to provide the ability to run a(n admittedly miniscule) Kubernetes cluster for free. So, why do this? It provides a definitive Kubernetes (Engine) experience on Google Cloud Platform that you may use for learning and testing. Kubernetes Engine the master node(s) and the control plane are free. Kubernetes (i.e. Compute Engine) nodes potentially incur charges including for the VM runtime and any attached storage, snapshots etc.