Like other public cloud vendors, Google has a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offering with Cloud Functions – and recently announced the second generation's general availability (GA).
Earlier this year, Google released the second generation of Cloud Functions in preview with more controls over functions runtime, providing better performance, scalability, and support triggers from more than 90 event sources. With the GA release, the company added more compute options, granular controls for faster rollbacks, and new triggers from over 125 Google and third-party SaaS event sources using Eventarc.
According to Google Cloud's Vidya Nagarajan Raman, head of product management, and Jaisen Mathai, group product manager, more organizations are choosing Cloud Functions for increasingly demanding and sophisticated workloads that require increased compute power and more granular controls. Since the preview release, Google has added:
- Rollback features for functions to any previous deployment quickly and safely, or the possibility to configure how traffic is routed across revisions. When a developer deploys a function, a new revision is created.
- Support for even larger instances, now up to 32Gb of RAM and 8 vCPU (preview).
- The ability to move the function to Cloud Run or even to Kubernetes.
- Function can now be triggered from 125+ event sources (instead of 90+ earlier) from Google and third-party SaaS event sources (through Eventarc) and events from custom sources (by publishing to Pub/Sub directly).
Furthermore, the company made improvements in the UI with:
- Eventarc subtask, allowing developers to quickly discover and configure how their function is triggered during creation.
- Deployment tracker, enabling developers to view their deployment status and spot any errors quickly if they occur during deployment.
- Improved testing tab, which simplifies calling functions with sample payloads.
- Customizable dashboard immediately provides developers with important metrics, and the accessibility updates improve the experience for screen readers.
Boon Khai Lim, a software engineer at Meta, concluded in his medium blog post on the second generation of Cloud Functions:
With the transition of underlying architectures to Cloud Run and Eventarc, the 2nd gen Cloud Function supports a whole new set of use cases while continuing to maintain great developer experiences, i.e., allowing developers to focus on the business logic while GCP handles the complexity of managing underlying platform and resources.
In addition, Loïc Mathieu, a software architect, Java and JVM passionate, concluded in his blog post:
Moreover, support for the CloudEvents standard makes it possible to write functions that are less dependent on Google Cloud and, above all, to use a format that is supported on other clouds and in other technologies (Kafka broker, HTTP client, ...).
The second generation of Cloud Functions is currently available in a subset of regions with the pricing based on Cloud Run pricing.
