Cloud Run Functions (aka Cloud Functions)

Cloud Run functions is a serverless execution environment for building and connecting cloud services. With Cloud Run functions, you write single-purpose functions that are attached to events emitted from your cloud infrastructure and services. Your function is triggered when an event being watched is fired. Your code executes in a fully managed environment in Cloud Run. There is no need to provision any infrastructure or worry about managing any servers.

You can write Cloud Run functions using a number of

supported programming languages⁠

. You can take your function and run it in any standard runtime environment for one of the supported languages, which makes both portability and local testing a breeze.

Functions are built into containers and deployed as services on Cloud Run. This gives you complete access and control over the behavior of the function.

Events and triggers

Cloud events are things that happen in your cloud environment. These might be things like changes to data in a database, files added to a storage system, or a new virtual machine instance being created.

Events occur whether or not you choose to respond to them. You create a response to an event with a trigger. A trigger is a declaration that you are interested in a certain event or set of events. Binding a function to a trigger lets you capture and act on events. For more information on creating triggers and associating them with your functions, see

Cloud Run functions triggers⁠

Use cases

Use cases

Use case

Description

Data processing / ETL

Listen and respond to

Cloud Storage

⁠

events such as when a file is created, changed, or removed. Process images, perform video transcoding, validate and transform data, and invoke any service on the internet from your Cloud Run functions.

Webhooks

Using an

HTTP trigger

⁠

, respond to events originating from 3rd party systems like GitHub, Slack, Stripe, or from anywhere that can send HTTP requests.

Lightweight APIs

Compose applications from lightweight, loosely coupled bits of logic that are quick to build and that scale instantly. Your functions can be event-driven or invoked directly over HTTP/S.

Mobile backend

Use Google's mobile platform for app developers,

Firebase

⁠

, and write your mobile backend in Cloud Run functions. Listen and respond to events from Firebase Analytics, Realtime Database, Authentication, and Storage.

IoT

Imagine tens or hundreds of thousands of devices streaming data into Pub/Sub, thereby launching Cloud Run functions to process, transform and store data. Cloud Run functions lets you do it in a way that's completely serverless.

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Versions

There are two versions of Cloud Run functions:

Cloud Run functions, formerly known as Cloud Functions (2nd gen), which deploys your function as services on Cloud Run, allowing you to trigger them using Eventarc and Pub/Sub.

Cloud Run functions (1st gen), formerly known as Cloud Functions (1st gen), the original version of functions with limited event triggers and configurability

Comparison table