Experimenting with GCP Cloud Functions

I’m taking Information Security and Privacy for my graduate program right now, and the topic has diverted this week to containerization and serverless architecture. I’ve decided to document getting a function set up on GCP (Google Cloud Platform) because I haven’t really dabbled with any function-based platforms yet. My knowledge on serverless is pretty much “it’s a function in the cloud” which doesn’t say much, so I’m hoping to grasp a little more what the implementation looks like with this.

I’m choosing GCP (over AWS or Azure) because I like their documentation and console. I’ve chosen to build a function that will deliver a Game of Thrones winner because — well, why not?

Setup

It’s pretty easy to set up. Just go to Google’s GCP page and click “Cloud Function” from the sidebar. There may be a few extra steps if you’re a new GCP user. In order to create a Cloud Function, you just have to opt into the free trial, which gives users $300 for a year (at least, I think that’s what I read) and you do need to input a credit card for when the $300 is used up.

Creating a function

This is so much easier than I thought it would be. I clicked a button, and a form has been rendered for me to create my function. There’s even a text box to write my code. I can choose between JavaScript (with different Node engines), Python (3) and Go (1.11). While I want to practice my Go, I think I’ll opt for JS because I can write it about 100x faster.

Step 1: Create a function

I’m starting to think this is a blog post about how easy it is to create a function on GCP, but I want to keep in mind that having 100s or even 1000s of these could get incredibly complex very quickly.

I wrote my program and was able to “deploy” it (in this case, that would mean uploading it). I used pictures from Fandom because I didn’t want to make any outgoing requests that would cause latency and complexity.