Back end commodified by Firebase
Lenny Bogdonoff, co-founder and CTO of Milk Video, on the past, present and future of Javascript
The real shift was that a small web team no longer needed to design, host, and babysit its own server stack to ship a useful product. Services like Firebase turned common back end jobs into ready made building blocks, so a front end developer could add login, data storage, and live updates by calling an API and using a dashboard, instead of provisioning databases, writing server code, and managing ops.
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In practice, commodified back end means buying standard pieces. Auth from Auth0 or Firebase Auth, search from Algolia, content from a headless CMS, data from Firebase or Supabase. The app becomes a front end that stitches together specialized services over APIs.
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That changed who could build software. Bejamas described front end developers becoming full stack by using managed databases like Firebase and FaunaDB. The gain was speed and less DevOps work, especially for early teams and prototype stage products.
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The trade off is that commodified does not mean identical. Firebase was easy to start with, but several builders saw limits in cost and database flexibility, which is why newer tools like Supabase gained traction by pairing the same convenience with a relational Postgres core.
The direction of travel is that more of the back end becomes an interchangeable utility layer, and more product differentiation moves to the front end and workflow. As edge functions, hosted databases, and API first services improve, the winning tools will be the ones that make hard infrastructure feel invisible without forcing teams into painful rewrites later.