I recently came across Firebase and found it very interesting.
Having read up on the differences between hard real-time and soft real-time, I am now curious as to whether Firebase is appropriate for hard real-time computation or not.
My intuition is that it would only really be good for soft real-time, but I have come across little (other than its nature as SaaS) to truly validate this feeling.
Thinking about it more - network speed is an obvious problem, potentially causing seconds worth of delays. That would hardly qualify as hard real-time.