Cloud Functions

Google Cloud Functions is a serverless execution environment for building and connecting cloud services. It lets you run single-purpose functions in response to events without managing servers or runtime environments.

Key Features:

1. Event-driven - Triggered by HTTP, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Firestore, and more.

2. Serverless - Zero server management; scales from zero automatically.

3. Multiple runtimes - Node.js, Python, Go, Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP.

4. Pay per use - Billed per invocation and compute time with a generous free tier.

5. 2nd gen - Built on Cloud Run, supports longer timeouts and concurrency.

The below example shows an HTTP-triggered Cloud Function in Python.

Deploy and invoke the function,

It gives the following output,

{"message": "Hello, GCP!", "status": "success"}

Trigger Types:

HTTP triggers - Invoke via REST calls. Best for webhooks and APIs.

Event triggers - React to Cloud Storage uploads, Pub/Sub messages, Firestore changes, and other GCP events automatically.