Google Cloud Run functions

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 (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 and configurability.

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

Billing

Billng is based on invocation and resource consumption, with an additional charge for function storage. Users only pay for the time their code is executed, making it a cost-effective solution for applications with unpredictable traffic patterns.

The free tier includes 2 million invocations, 400,000 GB-seconds, 200,000 GHz-seconds of compute time and 5GB of Internet data transfer out per month. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

If your function uses Container Registry or Artifact Registry, you will incur charges for storing your function’s image, even when your use of Cloud Run functions falls within the free tier. At this moment, Container Registry is deprecated and will be completely replaced by Artifact Registry in March 2025.