At the recent Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled a new addition to its Firebase ecosystem designed to help developers build AI-powered apps using JavaScript/TypeScript. The company also announced that it will soon support Go.
The new tool called Firebase Genkit is an open-source framework under the Apache 2.0 license. This makes it easier to integrate AI capabilities into both new and existing software. Google focused on various use cases for Genkit, including a variety of generative AI functions such as automatic content generation, summarization, text translation, and image generation.
Chris Gill, Google’s product manager, and Peter Freese, a developer advocate, shared in the announcement that “using powerful, large language models to implement AI features is achievable, but pushing these features beyond the prototype stage is challenging.” They added: “Many developers are still exploring how to effectively scale these AI features in real-world production environments and monitor their performance to continuously improve them. In addition, ensuring security and reliability remains a challenge that needs attention. Everyone can benefit from some help in this area.”
The Firebase team assures developers that Genkit integration will be easy because it follows the same methodologies used in other Firebase tools. Developers can test functions locally using Genkit and then deploy applications using Google’s scalable serverless solutions, such as Cloud Functions for Firebase and Google Cloud Run. As an open-source solution, Genkit offers flexibility and extensibility. However, it comes pre-equipped to facilitate a variety of third-party open-source projects. In addition to Google’s own Gemini models, developers can access open models through Ollama. Genkit supports vector databases such as Chrome, Pinecone, pgvector PostgreSQL, and Google Cloud Firestore.
“Genkit is designed to be universally compatible with any models, vector stores, embedding tools, estimators, and other components through a system of plugins,” the developers at Google note. The company also highlighted that Project IDX, Google’s advanced web-based integrated development environment, which is now widely available, integrates seamlessly with Genkit’s developer interface.
In tandem with the launch of Genkit, Firebase introduced support for SQL databases using Firebase Data Connect, a Google Cloud SQL Postgres database. Additionally, the introduction of Firebase App Hosting marks a new era of serverless web hosting from Google, specifically built for server-based web applications. This platform manages everything from app creation to content distribution via CDN and server-side rendering, simplifying the process for developers.