Asking if Google offers serverless functionality, is like asking if water is wet. Of course, the behemoth has a FaaS platform. In the early days of cloud, Google was one of the pioneers in the pay-as-you-go space with their Platform as a Service, App Engine.
In 2017, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) launched their serverless execution environment Cloud Functions, which they renamed in August 2024 to Cloud Run functions.
Focus
Cloud Run functions integrates with various Google Cloud services and supports multiple programming languages. It includes automatic scaling in an event-driven architecture, where functions are triggered by events from other Google Cloud services and third-party tools.
Additionally, Cloud Run functions is fully managed and has the option to import third-party dependencies, making it a versatile choice for building serverless applications.
Two Generations of Google Cloud functions
The first generation functions is the original version with limited event triggers, configurability and does not support concurrency.
The second generation functions deploys your function as services on Cloud Run. These functions have access to all of Cloud Run’s capabilities, including:
- Multi-event trigger management on functions
- Mounting Cloud Storage volumes
- Traffic splitting between multiple revisions
- Inference functions with NVIDIA GPUs
- Configuring CPU allocation separate from memory
