Do more with Cloud Functions Second Generation

Cloud Functions gives developers quite an ideal experience. In Google’s own words, Cloud Functions lets you “Just write your code and let Google Cloud handle the operational infrastructure”. While this is a very ideal developer experience, the obvious constraint of such abstraction is that your code is limited by the use cases supported by the underlying platform.

To improve the developer experience and support even more use cases, Google recently announced a public preview of the second generation of Cloud Functions. The new generation of Cloud Functions is built on Google Cloud’s cloud-run and eventarc infrastructure. In this post, I discuss how the Cloud Functions Second Generation vastly improves developer experience while maintaining the same developer contract.

Longer processing

Cloud Functions now supports longer processing times. HTTP functions can now support over 60 minutes whereas event-driven functions support 10-minute runtimes. Previously cloud functions only supported 9-minute runtimes. This means that you can now bring more intensive workloads like APU scrapers and data pumps to cloud functions. This can especially be useful to process large streams of data in your data pipelines!

Greater compute power