Google recently announced a public preview of the second generation of Cloud Functions, functions as a service platform in Google Cloud. The new version introduces additional controls, improved performance and scalability.
One of the main changes is longer processing times for HTTP functions, up to 60 minutes, supporting use cases that involve large data streams such as data processing pipelines or machine learning.
Forrest Brazil, head of content at Google Cloud, stated that this version is built on Google Cloud Run.
The new version reduces cold starts and latency, increases concurrency to 1000 requests per function instance, and supports larger instances, up to 16 GB of memory and 4 vCPUs.
Built using open source build packages and feature frameworks, the second generation uses Eventarc to deliver events, supporting triggers from different sources. Vinod Ramachandran and Jacen Mathai, Product Managers at Google, explain that second-generation cloud features now include built-in support for Eventarc, which provides over 90 event sources from direct sources and cloud audit logs (BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Firebase). And of course, Cloud Functions still supports events from custom sources by publishing them directly to Pub/Sub. These event-driven features follow the industry standard CloudEvents and are source agnostic to provide a consistent developer experience.
The new version supports splitting traffic across multiple rollbackable versions of the feature and pre-instances to reduce cold starts, a feature recently introduced in the first generation and described separately in InfoQ.
Google Cloud isn't the only cloud service provider to offer a serverless computing platform, but service specifications vary between major providers: Amazon and Microsoft don't support 60-minute runtimes or 16GB of storage. For example, AWS Lambda Functions can be configured to run up to 15 minutes, while Azure Functions supports a maximum memory size of up to 1536 MB.
Cloud Functions Gen 2 is currently in public preview in select regions at pricing based on Cloud Run pricing.
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