The serverless computing service offered by Google Inc is called Google Cloud Functions (GCF).

We basically refer to it as GCF in this section. Like other serverless platforms, GCF provides both execution environment and the SDK to help us develop and manage the entire life cycle of our function. It provides an SDK to help us get started with the framework. The main language supported by GCF is JavaScript and there is a Node.js Docker image for us to use. With Docker, it is convenient to build a function. When about to deploy, it is relatively easy to deploy it with the Google Cloud CLI tool. It is natural that GCF will allow us to connect to other Google-based services efficiently:

The preceding diagram demonstrates one of the common use cases implemented on Google Cloud. It is an example of an IoT pipeline using all Google Cloud services. A Google Cloud Function is used to compute data from the message queue and divert it to both the big data stack and Firebase. The Firebase service acts as a Backend as a Service (BaaS) for mobile applications. In a later chapter, we will demonstrate a similar BaaS using the Parse platform.