google_cloud

Yeah AWS Lambda / API gateway and such, I do think in terms of a no manage DB firebase looks better.

The concern I have with all of the serverless approaches comes down to scaling with a team:

* The deployment story is still a bit messy
   * dev environment generally connects to shared resource
   * testing is tricky / non existant
   * debugging tools aren't up to speed.
* doesn't do well with dev/staging/prod completely forgetting as the team scales branch based dev
* less so on AWS to standard DBs, but firebase doesn't have a great story for data analysis yet. 

All that being said, I think serverless looks awesome.
It is quite possibly the future for a large portion of projects depending on size and complexity.
I really want to play with it a bit more and for personal projects will definitely be exploring. 
At this point I would still be a bit to concerned to try to build a buisness around it.

Anyways, just my 2 cents.

yep definitely have pain having front end (or mobile Android/IOS devs) setup local dev servers... Can end up wasting a lot of time. Docker can help ease that if you do full dev environment in Docker, but that has some disadvantages.

I do think in the next while we will see most of the pain points resolved for serverless, not entirely sure on the 2 year timeline, but it will evolve quickly.

On the transition totally true, I helped migrate a mobile app with Parse backend to a pure Ruby/Rails backend as Parse was failing to scale to their transaction rate. It takes some work but isn't entirely difficult.. a few months later Parse announced it was shutting down so everyone was happy to be off of it.

Another advantage is Firebase actually handles a lot of offline sync DB issues for mobile devs which is a win as well for early development iterations.

Trek10 who I work with on AWS stuff has been digging more into the testing and multi-environment issues around serverless and hopefully will share some of their solutions shortly ;)