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by sladey 2713 days ago
We've used GCF for some production tasks and it's worked pretty well for us.

Would like to see some more runtimes/languages. I'm hoping AWS' recent layers implementation has made this more of a focus at Google. I'm curious how the implementation of Go has affected the ease of integrating other languages.

2 comments

> I'm curious how the implementation of Go has affected the ease of integrating other languages.

In some ways, it helps. You start to see similar issues arise and know what to look out for when you're launching a new runtime. In other ways, every language has its peculiarities and its own set of design considerations.

Launching/polishing a completely new language still takes a decent amount of work. Launching a new version of an existing language tends to be much quicker.

Although I've never used Lambda Layers. Do you think a similar approach is something that could be implemented?

Maybe even just something for compiled languages like Go, Crystal, etc that will just run the binary?

It's definitely something that we've discussed.

Would you consider running a container that could be run like Cloud Functions? This container could run the binary that you create. It's not something that we support today but I'm curious whether this would meet your needs.

> running a container that could be run like Cloud Functions

Does this mean we actually run the container ourselves on our GKE cluster or in a VM? Or do you mean a "container" runtime for Cloud Functions? Both would be interesting, but we'd prefer the latter since there would be less to manage. I'd be interested to see the performance of it.

If you're interested in something along the lines of the latter, you can sign up for an early access preview here: g.co/serverlesscontainers
> It's definitely something that we've discussed.

This is something Cloud Native Buildpacks (buildpacks.io) are intended to make easy. We hang out on buildpacks.slack.com, if you'd like to come pick our brains.

Given what we've seen with AppEngine they've been moving away from custom language toolchains and to a more containerized deployment approach.
You're right. If you look around in the logs for the deployment output, you'll see that both Cloud Functions and App Engine go through a container build step via Cloud Build.