Cloud Run functions overview

What are Google Cloud Run functions?

Google Cloud Run functions is a serverless execution environment for building and connecting cloud services. With Cloud Run functions you write single-purpose functions that are attached to events emitted from your cloud infrastructure and services. Your function is triggered when an event being watched is fired. Your code executes in a fully managed environment. There is no need to provision any infrastructure or worry about managing any servers.

You can write Cloud Run functions using a number of supported programming languages. You can take your function and run it in any standard runtime environment for one of the supported languages, which makes both portability and local testing a breeze.

Connect and extend cloud services

Cloud Run functions provides a connective layer of logic that lets you write code to connect and extend cloud services. Listen and respond to a file upload to Cloud Storage, a log change, or an incoming message on a Pub/Sub topic. Cloud Run functions augments existing cloud services and lets you address an increasing number of use cases with arbitrary programming logic. Cloud Run functions have access to the Google Service Account credential and are thus seamlessly authenticated with the majority of Google Cloud services, including Cloud Vision, as well as many others. In addition, Cloud Run functions are supported by numerous Google Cloud client libraries, which further simplify these integrations.

Events and triggers

Cloud events are things that happen in your cloud environment. These might be things like changes to data in a database, files added to a storage system, or a new virtual machine instance being created.

Events occur whether or not you choose to respond to them. You create a response to an event with a trigger. A trigger is a declaration that you are interested in a certain event or set of events. Binding a function to a trigger lets you capture and act on events. For more information on creating triggers and associating them with your functions, see Cloud Run functions triggers.

Serverless

Cloud Run functions removes the work of managing servers, configuring software, updating frameworks, and patching operating systems. The software and infrastructure are fully managed by Google so that you just add code. Furthermore, provisioning of resources happens automatically in response to events. This means that a function can scale from a few invocations a day to many millions of invocations without any work from you.

Use cases

Asynchronous workloads (such as lightweight ETL) or cloud automations (such as triggering application builds) now no longer need their own server or a developer to manually manage them. You deploy a function bound to the event you want and you're done.

The fine-grained, on-demand nature of Cloud Run functions also makes it a perfect candidate for lightweight APIs and webhooks. In addition, the automatic provisioning of HTTP endpoints when you deploy an HTTP function means there is no complicated configuration required as there is with some other services. See the following table for additional common Cloud Run functions use cases:

Use case Description
Data processing / ETL Listen and respond to Cloud Storage events such as when a file is created, changed, or removed. Process images, perform video transcoding, validate and transform data, and invoke any service on the internet from your Cloud Run functions.
Webhooks Using an HTTP trigger, respond to events originating from 3rd party systems like GitHub, Slack, Stripe, or from anywhere that can send HTTP requests.
Lightweight APIs Compose applications from lightweight, loosely coupled bits of logic that are quick to build and that scale instantly. Your functions can be event-driven or invoked directly over HTTP/S.
Mobile backend Use Google's mobile platform for app developers, Firebase, and write your mobile backend in Cloud Run functions. Listen and respond to events from Firebase Analytics, Realtime Database, Authentication, and Storage.
IoT Imagine tens or hundreds of thousands of devices streaming data into Pub/Sub, thereby launching Cloud Run functions to process, transform and store data. Cloud Run functions lets you do it in a way that's completely serverless.

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