Stephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey are joined today by fellow Googlers Jaisen Mathai and Sara Ford to hear all about Cloud Functions (2nd gen) and how it differs from the original.

Jaisen gives us some background on Cloud Functions and why it was built. Supporting seven languages, this tool allows clients to write a function without worrying about scaling, devops, and a number of other things that are handled by Cloud Functions automatically. Customer feedback led to new features, and that’s how the second evolution of Cloud Functions came about. Don’t worry, first gen users! This will continue to be available and supported.

Features in the 2nd gen fit into three categories: performance, cost, and control. Among other benefits, costs stay low or may even be reduced with some of the new features, larger instances and longer processing times mean better performance, and traffic splitting means better control over projects. Sara details an example illustrating the power of the new concurrency features, and Jaisen helps us understand when Cloud Functions is the right choice for your project and when it’s not. Our guests walk us through getting started with Cloud Functions and using the 2nd gen additions.

Companies like Lucille Games are using Cloud Functions, and our guests talk more about how specific users are leveraging the new features of the 2nd gen.

Jaisen Mathai

Jaisen is a product manager for Cloud Functions. He’s been at Google for about six years and before joining Google was both a developer and product manager.

Sara Ford

Sara is a Cloud Developer Advocate focusing on Cloud Functions and enjoys working on serverless.

Cool things of the week

• No pipelines needed. Stream data with Pub/Sub direct to BigQuery blog
• Cloud IAM Google Cloud blog
• The Diversity Annual Report is now a BigQuery public dataset blog

Interview

• Cloud Functions site
• Cloud Functions 2nd gen walkthrough video
• Cloud Functions version comparison docs
• Lucille Games: Playing to win with Google Cloud Platform site
• BigQuery site
• Cloud Run site
• Eventarc docs
• Cloud Shell site
• GCP Podcast Episode 261: Full Stack Dart with Tony Pujals and Kevin Moore podcast
• Working with Remote Functions docs
• Cloud Console site
• Where should I run my stuff? Choosing compute options video

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Stephanie has been working on GCP Support Shorts.

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey