Early this week, Google announced the general availability of its most awaited service Cloud Function at its Google Cloud Next ‘18 conference, San Francisco. Google finally managed to board the serverless bus, that it missed two years ago allowing AWS and Azure to reach their current milestones. This move takes the current cloud platform war to a new level. Google’s Cloud Function now directly competes with Amazon’s Lambda and Microsoft’s Azure Functions.
Of late, application development has changed massively, with developers now focusing on application logic instead of infrastructure management, thanks to serverless computing. Developers can now prioritize agility, application quality, and faster deployment with zero server management, auto-scaling traffic management, and integrated security.
Source: Google Cloud website
Google’s event driven serverless platform showcases the ability to scale automatically, run codes in response to events, pay while your code runs, and zero server management. Cloud Functions can be used to build:
Serverless application backends
Developers can quickly build highly available, secure and cost-effective applications as a connective layer of logic is present in Cloud Functions that helps integrate and extend GCP and third-party services. In other words, you can directly call your code from any web, mobile, or backend application or trigger it from GCP services.
Real-time data processing
Cloud Functions can provide a variety of real-time data processing systems as it responds to events from GCP services such as Stackdriver logging, Cloud Storage, and more. This helps developers to execute their code in response to any change in data.
Intelligent applications
Developers can leverage Cloud Functions to build intelligent applications with Google Cloud AI integration. One can easily introduce pre-trained machine learning models into the application that can later analyze videos, classify images, convert speech to text, perform NLP (natural language processing) and more.
Developers can start making the most of Google Cloud Functions unless they are deploying functions written in Node.js 8 or Python, as these still remain in Beta. In addition to Cloud Functions, Google also announced a preview of serverless containers, a refreshed way of running containers in a fully managed environment. You can read more about this release from Google Cloud release notes.
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