My application needs to build a couple of large hashmaps before processing a user's request. Ideally I want to store these hashmaps in-memory on the machine, which means it never has to do any expensive processing and can process any incoming requests quickly.
But this doesn't work for firebase because there's a chance a user triggers a new instance which sets off the very time-consuming preprocessing step.
So, I tried designing my application to use the firebase database, and get only the data it needs from the database each time instead of holding all the data in-memory. But, since the cloud functions are downloading loads of data from the database, I have now triggered over 1.7 GB in download for this month, just by myself from testing. This goes over the quota.
There must be something I'm missing; all I want is a permanent memory storage of some hashmaps. All I want is for those hashmaps to be ready by the time the function is called with a request. It seems like such a simple requirement; how come there is no way to do this?