What is Google Cloud Functions

Google Cloud functions is a serverless platform, meaning that you don't have to host any of the code or worry about managing servers, all of that is done for you by Google Cloud.

Google Cloud functions provides the hosting and the environment for you to work in, just upload your code and you are good to go, you can use Google Cloud functions to manage background tasks that your users don't need to see, or you can effectively create your own APIs to push and pull data where you need it, personally I've been able to use it to perform web scraping allowing me to pull data from a website into my Google spreadsheet.

Perhaps you need to upload something into your database on Google Cloud, or process an order, or some other tasks that run behind the scenes that your users don't see, Google Cloud functions enables you to create your own custom functions that integrates with the rest of the Google Cloud ecosystem. You can see all the services in the Google Cloud ecosystem at https://cloud.google.com/docs/

Google Cloud functions supports NPM so you can easily install and import your favourite libraries and plugins. Google Cloud functions can be triggered via a HTTP request, Pub/Sub(Another function), and other Google Cloud Services, they don't however have an option to trigger on a timer.

Google Cloud functions has a pay-per-use pricing model, and you get 2 million free function executions every month.

The following summarises the things that I like and don't like about Azure functions.

Benefits of using Google Cloud Functions

• Provides 2 million free function executions and doesn't require any dependent paid services to make use of the service. 5GB internet egress traffic and 200,000 GHz-seconds of compute time per month. https://cloud.google.com/functions/pricing
• Provides development environments for Python, Go, and NodeJS.

Downsides of Google Cloud Functions

• If you aren't familiar with NodeJS or python its a slight learning curve to get started with only 3 languages supported.