Google is named a Leader in Forrester Functions-As-A-Service Wave

We introduced Cloud Functions in 2016 with the mission of making it easy for developers to build highly scalable, event-driven applications without having to worry about managing infrastructure. We are committed to providing flexible and fast application development while serving our customer needs for portability in our commitment to our open cloud. 

Our functions-as-a-service (FaaS) platform reflects our commitment to open source, leveraging innovations like our Functions Frameworks and Buildpacks. And today, we are pleased to share that Forrester Research has ranked Google Cloud a Leader in The Forrester Wave™:  Functions-As-A-Service, Q2 2023 report.

Evolving the limits of FaaS 

In the past year, Cloud Functions has pushed the boundaries of what is possible on FaaS, with the general availability of Cloud Functions 2nd gen, which provides powerful and efficient compute options. New features include:

• Integration with events from 140+ GCP, third-party, and custom sources using Eventarc

• Longer HTTP workloads with up to 60 minutes of execution time

• Larger memory and CPU for workloads up to 32 GB of RAM and 8 vCPUs

• Concurrent request processing (up to 1,000) with a single instance, drastically reducing cold starts, improving latency, and lowering cost

With Cloud Functions 2nd gen, our container-first approach gives any customer leveraging our FaaS the ability to run it both on-premises and on another cloud platform and easily go from Cloud Functions to Cloud Run and Google Kubernetes Engine. This approach lets you save money, and reduces the need for workload refactoring if you want to move your workloads between platforms.

Evaluation highlights

Google was among nine companies that Forrester invited to participate in its evaluation, and we achieved the highest scores possible in the Vision, Adoption and Observability criteria. Cloud Functions secured the top Roadmap criterion among all vendors evaluated. “[Cloud Functions’] impressive roadmap includes regional footprint expansion and better support for enterprise customers,” writes Forrester.

Support for specialized workloads 

Forrester noted that Cloud Functions is “the only FaaS platform that allows customers to configure memory allocation and CPU completely independently, which shores up its ability to handle specialized workloads.”

Cloud Functions achieved a score of 4.20 in the support for specialized workloads criteria, the highest score out of all the vendors. We believe this reflects our investment in providing a powerful platform for developers that are implementing Google Cloud’s AI and ML offerings such as generating machine learning predictions from Vertex AI models and for creating computer vision applications with Vision API.  In addition, Cloud Functions can be used for real-time data streaming for use cases such as fraud detection. 

“Google Cloud Functions stands out with its flexibility for configuring hardware and instance types,” Forrester states in the report. This showcases Functions’ ability to support content-centric workloads, including its support for Cloud CDN.

Integrated across Google Cloud

Our FaaS platform supports a wide range of use cases across Google Cloud, and our “investments in Firebase as a managed platform for web and mobile applications create additional use cases for the FaaS platform,” Forrester notes in the report. We recently pushed to GA the powerful Firebase Functions 2nd gen, which brings enhanced infrastructure and broader event coverage.  We also launched Firebase Extensions, which are pre-packaged serverless solutions built on Cloud Functions.

In short, Cloud Functions is a powerful tool that you can use to extend and automate your Google Cloud services. Recent innovations such as  BigQuery Remote Functions let you extend BigQuery SQL with your custom code in Cloud Functions for use cases such as enriching BigQuery data in real time using external APIs, calling models in Vertex AI and other machine learning platforms, and for data encryption and tokenization.

We are delighted and honored to be named a Leader in the The Forrester Wave™ Functions-As-A-Service Q2 2023 report. If you would like to start trying out Cloud Functions, Google Cloud offers a generous free tier where your first 2 million invocations are free.