Monitoring the performance of cloud real-time databases: A firebase case study

Cloud computing is a special distributed computing model built on top of the Internet infrastructure. Users can access processing power, infrastructure, applications, and even shared content distribution through the cloud as a service available anywhere, at any time. The rapid acceptance of cloud computing technologies in recent years has been astonishing and is gaining traction. Where the Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as a new technology that connects people, devices, data, and processes to communicate seamlessly, and in IoT environments, smartphones are the most used device due to their smartphone-enabling technologies, such as embedded sensors, Bluetooth, RFID tracking, and near field communications (NFC). In this paper, an IoT model made use of the embedded smartphone sensors to gather data, send it to a cloud Firebase service provider, and store it in Firebase’s real-time database. Additionally, using the Firebase test lab service, various experiments are carried out using 15 smartphone devices to observe the performance of the Firebase real-time database. The results show that using the Firebase console in conjunction with the Google Cloud monitoring dashboard for evaluating and analyzing several key factors that influence the performance of a database.