Cloud Functions

Cloud Code is a set of IDE plugins for popular IDEs that make it easier to create, deploy and integrate applications with Google Cloud. Cloud Code provides an excellent extension mechanism through custom templates. In this post, I show you how you can create and use your own custom templates to add some features beyond those supported natively in Cloud Code, such as .NET functions, event triggered functions and more. 

Cloud Code has been providing IDE support for the development cycle of Kubernetes and Cloud Run applications for a while now. I’m happy to report that the Dec 2022 version (1.21.0) of Cloud Code now supports Cloud Functions!

In this first release of Cloud Functions support, you can:

• Use the Cloud Functions Explorer to view your project’s Cloud Functions properties and source code.
• Download your Cloud Functions to edit your code locally, then configure your local workspace to deploy those changes directly from Cloud Code.
• Invoke your HTTP-triggered functions from VS Code.
• Use the Cloud Code Logs Viewer to view logs from your Cloud Functions.

Let’s take a closer look.

Back in August, we announced the 2nd generation of Cloud Functions with longer request processing times, larger instances, new event sources with Eventarc, and more.

A few weeks ago, .NET 6 support (public preview) was silently added to Cloud Functions.

Let’s see how to deploy some .NET 6 functions to Cloud Functions 2nd gen.

Functions Framework for .NET

Functions Framework for .NET is the easiest way to create .NET functions for consuming HTTP or CloudEvent requests.

Building APIs with Cloud Run

If I want to build an API, I usually use Cloud Run. In Cloud Run, you run a container and in that container, you run a web server that handles a base URL in this format:

https://<service-name>-<hash>-<region>.a.run.app

You can then have the web server handle any path under that base URL such as:

https://<service-name>-<hash>-<region>.a.run.app/hello
https://<service-name>-<hash>-<region>.a.run.app/bye

Building APIs with Cloud Functions

In Cloud Functions, you only have access to a function (no web server) and that function can only handle the base path: