At Google's I/O developer conference on Tuesday, the tech giant unveiled an addition to its Firebase platform called Firebase Genkit, aimed at simplifying the process of building AI-powered applications using JavaScript/TypeScript, with Go support coming soon.
Firebase Genkit is an open-source framework licensed under Apache 2.0, designed to help developers quickly integrate AI capabilities into new and existing applications.
Google highlighted several potential use cases for Genkit, including common generative AI applications such as content generation, summarization, text translation, and image generation.
"While powerful large language models bring AI-powered app features within reach, building and refining these features beyond a prototype is challenging," Google's Chris Gill and Peter Friese stated in Tuesday's announcement. "Many developers are still grappling with deploying these features in production at scale, understanding their performance for rapid iteration and improvement, and ensuring safety and stability throughout the process. Let's face it, everyone can use some help."
The Firebase team promises that Genkit will seamlessly integrate with the existing Firebase toolchain, allowing developers to test new features locally and deploy applications using Google's serverless platforms like Cloud Functions for Firebase and Google Cloud Run.
As an open-source framework, Genkit can be extended by developers as needed. Out of the box, it supports various third-party open-source projects, enabling the use of models like Ollama in addition to Google's own Gemini models. Genkit will also support vector databases such as Chrome, Pinecone, and PostgreSQL's pgvector, alongside Google Cloud Firestore.
"Genkit is designed to be open to any and all models, vector stores, embedders, evaluators, and other components through its plugin system," the team writes.
Google also announced that Project IDX, its next-gen web-based integrated developer environment now generally available, will support Genkit's developer UI out of the box.
Alongside Genkit, the Firebase team introduced support for SQL databases powered by Firebase Data Connect, a new service based on Google's Cloud SQL Postgres database.
Additionally, Firebase App Hosting, described as "the next generation of serverless web hosting with Google, designed specifically for server-rendered web apps," was announced. This serverless web hosting solution will manage everything from building the application to the CDN for content distribution and server-side rendering for developers.
