With Cloud Functions, there are no servers to provision, manage, patch, or update. Functions automatically scale and are highly available and fault-tolerant.Cloud Functions are great for building serverless backends, doing real-time data processing, and creating intelligent apps. Show
Learn the fundamentals of Cloud Functions using the GCP Console. Create and deploy a simple single-purpose Cloud Function written in Node.js that is triggered by an HTTP request. Create and deploy a simple single-purpose Cloud Function written in Go that is triggered by an HTTP request. Codelabs and QwiklabsCodelab With Cloud Functions, you write simple, single-purpose functions that are attached to events emitted from your cloud infrastructure and services. Your Cloud Function is triggered when an event being watched is fired. Your code executes in a fully managed environment. There is no need to provision any infrastructure or worry about managing any servers. Codelab Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. Cloud Functions is an event-driven serverless compute platform. Cloud Functions allows you to write your code without worrying about provisioning resources or scaling to handle changing requirements. Codelab The goal of this codelab is for you to understand how to use the logging and monitoring tools offered to all Cloud Function developers. These tools come with every Cloud Function that you deploy across all supported languages and should enable you to be more productive when writing and operating your serverless code. Qwiklabs Google Cloud Functions is a serverless execution environment for building and connecting cloud services. With Cloud Functions you write simple, single-purpose functions that are attached to events emitted from your cloud infrastructure and services. News feedGet the latest news and articles about Cloud Functions. VideosNever miss a Cloud Functions video. Experts and influencersMeet our Developer Advocate Cloud Functions experts Featured solutionsFeatured Cloud Functions products[{ "type": "thumb-down", "id": "missingTheInformationINeed", "label":"Missing the information I need" },{ "type": "thumb-down", "id": "tooComplicatedTooManySteps", "label":"Too complicated / too many steps" },{ "type": "thumb-down", "id": "outOfDate", "label":"Out of date" },{ "type": "thumb-down", "id": "samplesCodeIssue", "label":"Samples / code issue" },{ "type": "thumb-down", "id": "otherDown", "label":"Other" }] [{ "type": "thumb-up", "id": "easyToUnderstand", "label":"Easy to understand" },{ "type": "thumb-up", "id": "solvedMyProblem", "label":"Solved my problem" },{ "type": "thumb-up", "id": "otherUp", "label":"Other" }] AbstractWelcome to Google Cloud Platform! Welcome to Google Cloud Platform! Cloud Platform is a set of modular cloud-based services that provide building blocks you can use to develop everything from simple web sites to sophisticated multitier web-based applications. This chapter introduces the core components of Cloud Platform and guides you through the process of getting started with it. Cloud Platform Building BlocksThis section gives you an overview of the products in Cloud Platform and explains the technology clusters they belong to. This approach will help you select which chapters of this book you need to read to quickly get started with Cloud Platform. We do, however, encourage you to read the book cover to cover! ProjectsProjects are top-level containers in Cloud Platform. Using projects, you can consolidate all related resources, IT and non-IT, on a project-by-project basis. This enables you to work on several projects at the same time while ensuring that the resources are in separate control domains. Each project is identified by a tuple consisting of the following three items:
The command-line developer tool called gcloud (described later) requires a project ID for identifying and accessing various IT resources. Public-facing Cloud Platform APIs may require either the project ID or the project number for resource-identification purposes. Cloud Platform uses project numbers almost exclusively to identify projects. In addition to IT resources, a Cloud Platform project also stores information about billing and authorized users. In Cloud Platform, a billing account is considered separate from a project account. One billing can be linked to more than one project account. A billing account is identified by a set of the following four items:
By using projects, you can provide services to different customers and separate the associated costs. Cloud Platform generates a separate bill for each project. At the same time, you can pay for all your projects using the same billing account. As of this writing, a project can only be created using the web-based Developers Console, not with the gcloud command-line tool or the Cloud Platform API. You also can’t list all the projects associated with a Google account using gcloud or an API. This restriction is in place because the project-creation feature is not part of the public-facing APIs, which are also used by gcloud. However, you can store project information using gcloud and use it automatically for subsequent requests. You can create a project by visiting http://console.developers.google.com and filling in the required details. Regions, Zones, Resources, and QuotasCloud Platform resources are hosted in multiple locations worldwide. These locations are composed of regions, and each region is further broken into zones. A zone is an isolated location within a region. Zones have high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region. Cloud Platform resources can be classified as global, regional, or zonal. IT resources in the same region or zone can only use resources that are specific to the region or zone. For example, Compute Engine, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service product from Cloud Platform, instances and persistent disks are both zonal resources. If you want to attach a persistent disk to an instance, both resources must reside in the same zone. Similarly, if you want to assign a static IP address to a Compute Engine instance, the instance must reside in the same region as the static IP. Not all resources are region or zone specific; some, such as disk images, are global resources that can be used by any other resources at any location. During the resource-creation stage, depending on the scope of the resource, Cloud Platform prompts you to choose either a region or a zone. For example, when you create an instance or disk, you are prompted to select a zone where that resource should serve traffic. Other resources, such as static IPs, live in regions; when you select a region, the system chooses an appropriate regional IP address. Cloud Platform makes it easy to programmatically query for current regions and zones and to list all of a region’s or zone’s public details. Although regions and zones do not change frequently, Google wants to make it easy for you to retrieve this information without having to browse through a web site or documentation. Let’s look at how to use the gcloud command-line tool to query information about regions and zones. For now, focus on the results; you learn about gcloud later. All generally available Cloud Platform resources that have regional scope, such as Compute Engine, are available in all regions/zones. For products that have global scope, such as App Engine and BigQuery, you do not need to select a region or zone. Let’s list the regions where Compute Engine (and, by extension, persistent disks, load balancers, autoscalers, Cloud Storage, Cloud Datastore, and Cloud SQL) is available, using gcloud: $ gcloud compute regions list NAME CPUS DISKS_GB ADDRESSES RESERVED_ADDRESSES STATUS TURNDOWN_DATE asia-east1 2.00/24.00 10/10240 1/23 1/7 UP europe-west1 0.00/24.00 0/10240 0/23 0/7 UP us-central1 0.00/24.00 0/10240 0/23 0/7 UP This output shows that there are currently three regions in Cloud Platform, one on each major continent. This choice was made strategically to accommodate applications and data that need to reside on the respective continent. In addition to the regions, the previous output shows quota information. A quota in Cloud Platform is defined as a soft limit for a given type of resource. If you need more than the stated limit, you can request additional resources by filling out an online Google form. The previous output shows that this particular Google account has instantiated two CPUs, has a 10BG persistent disk, and is using two public IPs, one of which is a reserved IP address. All regions are operating normally, and there is no announced teardown date for any of them. Let’s examine one of the regions in detail: $ gcloud compute regions describe asia-east1 creationTimestamp: '2014-11-18T14:51:15.377-08:00' description: asia-east1 id: '1220' kind: compute#region name: asia-east1 quotas: - limit: 24.0 metric: CPUS usage: 2.0 - limit: 10240.0 metric: DISKS_TOTAL_GB usage: 10.0 - limit: 7.0 metric: STATIC_ADDRESSES usage: 1.0 - limit: 23.0 metric: IN_USE_ADDRESSES usage: 1.0 - limit: 1024.0 metric: SSD_TOTAL_GB usage: 0.0 - limit: 1500.0 metric: LOCAL_SSD_TOTAL_GB usage: 0.0 - limit: 240.0 metric: INSTANCES usage: 0.0 selfLink: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/www-redcross-sg/regions/asia-east1 status: UP zones: - https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/www-redcross-sg/zones/asia-east1-a - https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/www-redcross-sg/zones/asia-east1-b - https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/www-redcross-sg/zones/asia-east1-c This output shows more interesting and useful information about the region. First, you can see that Google publicly discloses when this zone went live (or was upgraded). Second, just like any other entity in Cloud Platform, the region has an ID, a name, and a description. Finally, the output states that the region contains three zones. Let’s now list all the zones in all the regions in Cloud Platform: $ gcloud compute zones list NAME REGION STATUS NEXT_MAINTENANCE TURNDOWN_DATE asia-east1-a asia-east1 UP asia-east1-c asia-east1 UP asia-east1-b asia-east1 UP europe-west1-b europe-west1 UP europe-west1-c europe-west1 UP europe-west1-d europe-west1 UP us-central1-f us-central1 UP us-central1-a us-central1 UP us-central1-c us-central1 UP us-central1-b us-central1 UP This output shows that there are a total of 10 zones across 3 regions. Of course, this is as of this writing; Google is expected to add new regions and zones regularly. From the region and zone names, you can decipher that the fully qualified name for a zone is made up of <region>-<zone>. For example, the fully qualified name for zone a in region us-central1 is us-central1-a. Let’s look at the details for one particular zone: $ gcloud compute zones describe asia-east1-a creationTimestamp: '2014-05-30T18:35:16.575-07:00' description: asia-east1-a id: '2220' kind: compute#zone name: asia-east1-a region: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/www-redcross-sg/regions/asia-east1 selfLink: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/www-redcross-sg/zones/asia-east1-a status: UP Just like a region, a zone has a creation date, an ID, a kind, and a name. The Developers ConsoleThe Developers Console is a web-based interface that you can use to create and manage your Cloud Platform resources. You can also view and manage projects, team members, traffic data, authentication, and billing through the Developers Console; see https://developers.google.com/console/help/new to learn about its capabilities. Figure 2-1 shows the Google Developers Console overview screen. Figure 2-1.  Google Developers Console Full size image This section looks at some of the Developers Console functionality that is generally applicable for deploying Cloud Platform products. Permissions and AuthEach Cloud Platform project can be accessed by one or more Google accounts. The Google account that creates a project is automatically designated as its owner. In addition to an owner, two other roles are allowed that have different levels of access to a project:
The owner, using the web-based Developers Console, can add additional owners, editors, and viewers. To do so, choose Developers Console ➤ Permissions ➤ Add Member, as shown in Figure 2-2. In addition to regular Google accounts (which are accessed by humans), Cloud Platform also supports a category called Service Accounts. These are automatically added by Cloud Platform and are used to authenticate the project to other Google services and APIs. Figure 2-2. Adding team members to a project Full size image Permissions allow a project’s resources to access various Cloud Platform APIs. Some APIs allow unlimited and unmetered access, such as the Compute Engine API. Other APIs impose daily quotas and access-rate limits. Auth (short for authentication) allows one or more client applications to access APIs that have been enabled in a particular project. In addition, it lets applications access your private data (for example, contact lists). We examine the OAUTH technology in Chapter 3. For now, you just need to know how to create new client ID or key using the Developers Console. Go to Developers Console ➤ APIs & Auth ➤ Credentials to create an OATH2 client ID or a public API access key, as shown in Figure 2-3. Figure 2-3. Creating new credentials Full size image When you use the version of OAUTH called three-legged authentication (3LO), your users are shown a consent screen that they need to accept before Google will authorize your application to access their private data. This is explained in the OAUTH section in Chapter 3. For now, to customize the consent screen in the Developers Console, choose Developers Console ➤ APIs & Auth ➤ Consent Screen as shown Figure 2-4. Figure 2-4. Consent screen setup and customization Full size image The Cloud SDK and the gcloud ToolThe Google Cloud SDK contains tools and libraries that enable you to easily create and manage resources on Cloud Platform. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and it requires Python 2.7.x or greater or another language runtime for language-specific support in the SDK. Installing the Cloud SDK is operating system dependent and is well documented at https://cloud.google.com/sdk. Follow the instructions there to install the Cloud SDK. The most common way to manage Cloud Platform resources is to use the gcloud command-line tool. gcloud is included as part of the Cloud SDK. After you have installed the Cloud SDK, you need to authenticate the gcloud tool to access your account. Run the command gcloud auth login to do this, as follows: $ gcloud auth login Your browser has been opened to visit: https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A8085%2F & prompt=select_account&response_type=code&client_id=32555940559.apps.googleusercontent.com& scope=https%3A%2F%2F www.googleapis.com%2Fauth%2Fuserinfo.email+https%3A%2F%2F www.googleapis.com%2Fauth%2Fcloud-platform+https%3A%2F%2Fwww.googleapis.com%2Fauth%2F appengine.admin+https%3A%2F%2F www.googleapis.com%2Fauth%2Fcompute&access_type=offline Saved Application Default Credentials. You are now logged in as []. Your current project is [cloud-platform-book]. You can change this setting by running: $ gcloud config set project PROJECT gcloud opens a new browser window when you execute this command. After you click Accept, control returns to the gcloud tool, and your gcloud instance is configured to access your Google account and project. If you would like to switch to another account or project, you can use the following commands (replacing the account and project values): $ gcloud config set account $ gcloud config set project cloud-platform-book gcloud has a comprehensive built-in help system. You can request help at multiple levels. Here are a few examples:
This way, you can request help at multiple levels. To learn about all of gcloud’s features, visit https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud. You can list the various components supported in gcloud by using the command gcloud components list. APIs and Cloud Client LibrariesGoogle follows an API-first development philosophy, and APIs are the primary developer interface for Google’s products, including Cloud Platform. Hence, before you can use a product—say, Compute Engine—you need to enable that particular API in your project. API enablement is on a project-by-project basis. Google makes it easy for you to enable a particular API using the Developers Console. You can access the APIs section by choosing Developers Console ➤ APIs & Auth ➤ APIs. The tabbed screen shows the list of all available APIs and the APIs that have been enabled in a project. Figure 2-5 shows a subset of the APIs available, and Figure 2-6 shows the APIs that have been enabled for this project. Figure 2-5. Subset of APIs available to Google developers Full size image Figure 2-6. List of APIs enabled in one project Full size image Deploying resources on demand and releasing them when they aren’t needed realizes the power of the Cloud Platform. This workflow can be achieved using several methods. When you use the Developers Console, the response time is slow and the process is manual. When you use the gcloud tool, the response time is faster, and you can automate the process by using a script. However, Google designed gcloud to be used by developers and not programs, so you have to write code to parse the command output. You can use the Cloud Platform APIs to allocate and release resources as needed, but because the APIs are RESTful and stateless, you need to maintain state between API calls. Cloud Client libraries fill the gap of programmatically accessing the Cloud Platform while integrating into the respective programming language so that the client can use other language features. The Cloud Platform APIs have been implemented as library functions in several programming languages. As of this writing, Google officially supports the Python, Node.js, and Go languages. Cloud Platform ProductsThis section describes the various Cloud Platform technologies covered in this book. We hope this overview will guide you on your journey into Cloud Platform:
SummaryThis chapter introduced you to the Cloud Platform’s intricacies. We started by explaining the core building blocks of Cloud Platform, the various components of a project, and the steps you need to follow to get started. We also explained the developer tools and gave a brief overview of the Cloud Platform products discussed in this book. Welcome aboard—let’s get going! Author informationAuthors and Affiliations
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Rights and permissionsCopyright information© 2015 S. P. T. Krishnan and Jose L. Ugia Gonzalez About this chapterWhich cloud service can execute code in Google Cloud?Codelabs and Qwiklabs. With Cloud Functions, you write simple, single-purpose functions that are attached to events emitted from your cloud infrastructure and services. Your Cloud Function is triggered when an event being watched is fired. Your code executes in a fully managed environment.
Which way is Google Cloud access?Google Cloud Storage (GCS) offers world-wide storage and retrieval of any amount of data.. Include the bucket name and any parent folders.. To select a single file, enter the file name.. To select multiple files, enter the final folder name and select Use all files in path option.. Which of the following provides access control to Google Cloud resources?Google Cloud offers Identity and Access Management (IAM), which lets you give more granular access to specific Google Cloud resources and prevents unwanted access to other resources. IAM lets you adopt the security principle of least privilege, so you grant only the necessary access to your resources.
In which ways can we interact with the services and products available in the Google Cloud Platform?There are three ways you can interact with services and resources within Google Cloud. That is through the online Google Cloud Console, the Command line interface or through Client libraries.
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