Google Cloud introduced Cloud Functions in 2016 with the mission to make it easier for developers to build highly scalable, activity-oriented applications without having to worry about infrastructure management. With its commitment to the open cloud, Google Cloud provides flexible and rapid application development while serving the mobility needs of its customers.

Forrester Research has selected Google Cloud as the leader in its evaluation of the “Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS)” platform.

Google Cloud has expanded the boundaries of what is possible on Phase with the introduction of Cloud Functions Generation 2, which offers powerful and efficient computing options. New features include:

• Integration with more than 140 GCP, third-party and private source events using Eventarc
• Up to 60 minutes execution time for longer HTTP workloads
• 32GB RAM and up to 8 VCPUs more memory and CPU for workloads
• Simultaneous request processing with a single instance (up to 1,000) offers the advantage of greatly reducing cold starts, improving latency, and cost advantage.

With Cloud Functions 2nd generation, our container-first approach gives all customers who benefit from our Phase the ability to run both on-premises and on another cloud platform and easily migrate from Cloud Functions to Cloud Run and Google Kubernetes Engine. This approach saves you money and reduces the need for workload reorganization when you want to move your workloads across platforms.

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Highlights in the evaluation

Google was among the nine companies Forrester invited to participate in its evaluation, achieving the highest possible scores on the Vision, Adoption and Observability criteria. Cloud Functions achieved the best Roadmap criterion among all vendors evaluated.

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Support for custom workloads

Forrester noted that Cloud Functions “is the only FaaS platform that allows customers to fully independently configure memory allocation and CPU, which in turn supports the ability to manage custom workloads.”

Cloud Functions achieved the highest score among all providers, scoring 4.20 in the custom workloads support criterion. We believe this reflects our investment in providing a strong platform for developers implementing Google Cloud's AI and ML offerings, such as creating machine learning forecasts from Vertex AI models and building computer vision applications with the Vision API. Cloud Functions can also be used for real-time data streaming in use cases such as fraud detection.

“Google Cloud Functions stands out for its flexibility to configure hardware and instance types,” Forrester says in the report. This demonstrates Functions' ability to support content-centric workloads, including Cloud CDN support.

Integration across Google Cloud

Forrester notes in the report that the FaaS platform supports a wide range of use cases across Google Cloud, and that “our investments in Firebase as a managed platform for web and mobile applications are creating additional use cases for the FaaS platform.” The powerful Firebase Functions 2 Gen GA was recently introduced to the powerful Firebase Functions 2, bringing enhanced infrastructure and wider scope of activity. Firebase Extensions, pre-packaged serverless solutions built on Cloud Functions, are also available.

In short, Cloud Functions is a powerful tool that you can use to extend and automate your Google Cloud services. Recent innovations such as BigQuery Remote Functions allow you to extend BigQuery SQL with your custom code in Cloud Functions for use cases such as enriching BigQuery data in real time using external APIs, and calling models on Vertex AI and other machine learning platforms.

We are delighted and honored that Google Cloud has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ Functions-As-A-Service Q2 2023 report. If you want to get detailed information about the solution, you can contact us.