Google Cloud Functions

Google Cloud Functions is Google Cloud's function-as-a-service offering, now presented under the name Cloud Run functions after Google folded its functions product into the Cloud Run platform. Anyone researching the older name will land on the same product; the documentation, quickstarts and pricing all now refer to Cloud Run functions.

The pitch is that you bring the code and Google handles the rest. You write and run small snippets that respond to events, and the operational infrastructure underneath is managed for you. That extends to scale, which Google describes as serving users from zero to planet-scale without thinking about infrastructure, and to orchestration, where functions act as the glue connecting Google Cloud products to one another or to third-party services through events.

Billing is metered to execution time in 100 millisecond increments and you pay nothing while a function is idle, since the service spins instances up and backs them down in response to events. To limit lock-in concerns, functions are built on the open source Functions Framework, which runs the same code across Cloud Run, a local development environment, on-premises and other Knative-based serverless environments.

Published use cases cover integration with third-party APIs and webhooks, such as sending a confirmation email after a Stripe payment or responding to Twilio message events; serverless mobile and IoT backends; real-time file processing, including generating thumbnails immediately after an upload; stream processing driven by Pub/Sub; and video, image and sentiment analysis. Named customers include Commerzbank, Telecom Argentina, Smart Parking and Semios, while HomeAway reported halving development time and lowering cost by more than 66 percent using Cloud Functions with Firestore.