Looking for a solution to run code in the cloud without having to worry about server maintenance or working on containers? Google Cloud Functions is what you've been looking for!
Google Cloud Functions is a Function as a Service (Faas) tool that allows engineers and developers to run code without worrying about managing the underlying machines.
This is an easy way to work on code in the cloud and in different languages, integrating your functions with different ecosystems, without servers on which to provision, patch or update. Functions scale automatically and are highly available and fault tolerant. Google Cloud Functions is also a great tool for serverless back-end creation, real-time data processing, and intelligent app creation.
Why to use Google Cloud Functions
Cloud Functions are scalable as needed and integrate with the Google Cloud operational suite, e.g. Cloud Logging, immediately. The functions are useful when you have a task or series of tasks that need to happen in response to an event such as HTTP, Cloud Storage, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Firestore, Firebase, and in response to Google Cloud Logging events. With Cloud Functions, monitoring, logging, and debugging are all integrated, and functions scale up and down as needed, in a highly flexible and very low cost manner.
This is especially useful when you need to focus on writing code and do not want to worry about the underlying infrastructure.
You can write functions in the Google Cloud Platform console or write them locally and deploy Google Cloud tools on your local computer.
Cloud Functions have some limitations, such as a nine-minute execution limit, but they are a good choice for short-lived requests that perform a specific task in response to another event.
The benefits of Cloud Functions
We have tried to summarize the main advantages of Cloud Function:
- create and deploy code and functions to Cloud Functions using only your web browser;
- offer scalability from zero to millions of operations, on a global scale, without the need to manage any infrastructure;
- Cloud Functions offers a simple and intuitive development experience. Write the code, Google Cloud will manage the operational infrastructure for you.
- speed up development by writing and executing small snippets of code that respond to events.
- simplifies complex orchestration problems by linking Google Cloud products to third-party services or to each other.
- you only pay for what you use;
- only the execution time of your function is billed, calculated to the nearest 100 milliseconds. When the function is idle, you pay only the low overhead. Cloud Functions starts and stops automatically in response to events you decide.
- no vendor constraints thanks to open technology;
- uses the open source FaaS (Function as a Service) framework to run functions in multiple environments while avoiding any constraints. Supported environments include Cloud Functions, the local development environment, on-premise, Cloud Run, and other Knative-based serverless environments.
power2Cloud can tell you what we design for our customers using event-based architectures with Cloud Functions: we promise to exceed all expectations!
Here are some usage scenarios where you could leverage the power of Google Cloud Function:
- Real-time file processing: run your code in real time as data changes. Cloud Functions can respond to events generated by Google Cloud services such as Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub and Cloud Firestore to process files immediately after upload and create thumbnails from uploaded images, process logs, validate content, perform video transcoding.
- Integration with third-party services and APIs: expose your microservices via HTTP APIs or to integrate them with third-party services that offer webhook integrations to quickly extend your application with advanced functionality, so you can send confirmation emails after a Stripe payment is confirmed or respond to Twilio events.
- Backend serverless for mobile devices: use Cloud Functions directly from Firebase to expand your application's functionality without starting any servers. Run your code in response to user actions, analytics, and authentication events to increase engagement with your contacts through event-based notifications and offload CPU-intensive tasks and networking services to Google Cloud.
- Serverless IoT backend: with Cloud Functions leverages Cloud IoT Core and other managed services to create backends for the collection, real-time processing, and analysis of telemetry data sent from Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
- Real-time stream processing: respond to Pub/Sub-generated events to process, transform, and enrich data streams for transaction processing, clickstream analysis, application activity monitoring, IoT device telemetry, social media analytics, and other types of applications.
- Virtual assistants and conversational experiences: easily integrate artificial intelligence into your Cloud Functions applications with the Cloud Speech API and Dialogflow, enhance your products and services with natural text- and voice-based conversational experiences that help users be more productive.
- Video and image analysis: with the Video Intelligence API and the Cloud Vision API to retrieve relevant information from videos and images, enabling you to search media content, locate them, and derive meaningful insights.
- Sentiment Analysis: with Cloud Functions along with the Cloud Natural Language API discover the structure and meaning of text, also add sentiment analysis and intent extraction capabilities to your applications.
Some use cases with HubSpot
power2Cloud is a HubSpot partner with strong field experience in various operational scenarios. Our customers have "extreme" customization and integration requirements, they need -- to accomplish small and large tasks -- solid and reliable infrastructure as well as performant and effective code. Our in-house development team, combining skills with the Sales, Marketing and Service teams, has successfully completed several projects where the great potential of HubSpot has reached even more incredible levels through the combination with Google Cloud Function.
The solutions devised for our clients have proven to be more than fully satisfactory with respect to initial requirements and, often, even superior to what was originally imagined by the technical teams of the Organizations that decided to rely on power2Cloud.
We tested the HubSpot-Google Cloud Functions winning pair on very different operational scenarios:
- Customization of interfaces of HubSpot,
- complex multi-way integrations on a global scale,
- intelligent systems with adaptive logic responsive to agents' inputs,
- Functionality extensions of HubSpot far beyond what is included in the standard plans for the world's best-performing CRM platform,
- etc...
We tackle each challenge with a multidisciplinary team, carefully designing processes, functionality, and logic in consultation with all teams, technical and non-technical. All at contained costs and an eye always on the scalability of our proposals.
Let's build the software you've been dreaming of together: all it takes is your ideas and power2Cloud technical skills!