Flutter and Dart Cookbook

Chapter 16. Introducing Cloud Services

In this chapter, you will learn how to integrate Flutter and Dart with cloud provider services. The first question you may ask is, Why would I use cloud services? Well, as you build more advanced applications that go beyond the mobile/desktop platform, you need somewhere to run/host your code. Using cloud services enables your application to utilize a variety of extensive services such as APIs, storage, authentication, and databases. But wait, don’t I get that with Firebase? Well, you do, but Firebase is but an appetizer for the main course.

Over the course of this chapter, we use Google Cloud as the basis for examples; however, the techniques apply to most cloud providers’ solutions. At the point of deployment, we will be introducing technology to minimize infrastructure configuration, i.e., serverless. Serverless relates to reduction of overhead associated with infrastructure set requirements.

You will learn how to:

• Get started with identity and access management

• Use Cloud Storage as a backend

• Develop a simple HTTP server

• Migrate an application to a container

• Deploy a container to a cloud provider

Cloud services continue to evolve, which provides developers with some amazing services to access via a pay-as-you-go model. The flexibility and performance offered by cloud services will give you a good kind of development headache. The objective of this chapter is to enable you to take advantage of the Firebase platform in your ...