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stewart27 | 7 years ago

Cloud Functions PM here. I can give some insight:

* We've been running a private early access preview/alpha since last August.

* This was our first compiled language on Cloud Functions, which came with its own set of challenges.

* It took us a while to find the right approach for supporting dependencies (both Go Modules and vendoring are supported). Unlike other providers, when you deploy your source code, Cloud Functions will automatically install dependencies listed in your go.mod file.

* Our testers gave us a ton of feedback that helped us polish the developer experience -- we identified and fixed many rough edges related to error messages during deployment/build and errors at runtime. Serverless products can be a bit opaque (since you can't just ssh into a machine), so getting this right is important.

I'd like to say that there was one big, interesting challenge that we had to tackle. But the reality is that we worked through many small details that only became apparent during testing. We wanted to address these so that we could offer a high quality experience for our public beta launch. We owe our alpha testers major credit for helping us find and solve issues.

Speaking of testers -- if you have feedback on the runtime, we'd love to hear from you in our Cloud Functions Beta Tester group [1].

[1] https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/getting-support#beta...

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sjeanpierre|7 years ago

Is there a reason dependency management happens like this? We currently deploy Go Lambda functions in AWS with the help of the Serverless Framework and it just uploads the cross compiled Binary and not the whole project.

Why wouldn't the binary be the deployed unit in this case?

ehsankia|7 years ago

While it's a lot more work for them, and some may already have the infrastructure setup for deploying their own binary, I think having GCP handle the end-to-end there is more user friendly in general. I can quickly write a Cloud Function from any computer, without having to deal with setting up the tool chains. If you want to just run binaries, sounds like Cloud Functions isn't what you're looking for.

vira28|7 years ago

Thanks for the response. Would like to see more granular triggers (event types). Especially with Firebase. Also, would like to see more examples with firestore.

stewart27|7 years ago

Which ones would you like to see? We're always looking for new use cases to support.

askver|7 years ago

Does this effort take you closer to the (supposed) goal of running arbitrary X86/ARM Linux binaries as cloud functions, or is that a completely different direction?

chrisbroadfoot|7 years ago

At the sandboxing level, it's already possible (you can upload any binary and fork/exec it from one of the supported languages). That's made possible by gVisor, which is the underlying sandbox technology used in GAE and GCF.

As for making that an actual product, we're working on that, too. Sign up for the alpha here:

g.co/serverlesscontainers

Disclaimer: I work on GCP.