Managing and monitoring Google Cloud Functions

Tutorial 4 of 5

1. Introduction

Goal of the Tutorial

The aim of this tutorial is to provide a comprehensive guide on how to manage and monitor Google Cloud Functions.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this tutorial, you will learn how to:
- Deploy Google Cloud Functions
- Test the functions
- Control access to your functions
- Monitor your functions

Prerequisites

  • Basic understanding of Google Cloud Platform
  • Familiarity with JavaScript (Node.js)

2. Step-by-Step Guide

Google Cloud Functions is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you.

Deploying Google Cloud Functions

To deploy a Google Cloud Function, run the following command in your terminal:

gcloud functions deploy YOUR_FUNCTION_NAME --runtime nodejs10 --trigger-http --allow-unauthenticated

Testing Google Cloud Functions

After deploying, you can test your function in the GCP console. Navigate to the Cloud Functions page, select your function, and click the 'TEST FUNCTION' button.

Access Control

You can control who has access to your function by removing the --allow-unauthenticated flag during deployment. Then, in the GCP console, you can specify which users or service accounts can invoke your function.

Monitoring Google Cloud Functions

You can monitor your functions using Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver). Navigate to the 'Logs' tab in the Cloud Functions details page to view logs for each function invocation.

3. Code Examples

Deploying a Simple Function

Here's an example of a simple HTTP function:

exports.helloWorld = (req, res) => {
  res.send('Hello, World!');
};

You can deploy this function using the command mentioned earlier. After successful deployment, GCP will provide a URL that you can use to invoke your function.

Access Control

To allow a specific user to invoke your function, run the following command:

gcloud functions add-iam-policy-binding YOUR_FUNCTION_NAME \
  --member=user:EMAIL \
  --role=roles/cloudfunctions.invoker

4. Summary

In this tutorial, we've covered how to deploy, test, manage access to, and monitor Google Cloud Functions.

For further learning, you can explore how to handle different types of events (e.g., Pub/Sub events, Firestore events) with Cloud Functions, and how to integrate Cloud Functions with other GCP services.

5. Practice Exercises

  1. Create a Cloud Function that responds with 'Hello, NAME!', where NAME is a query parameter in the HTTP request. Test your function in the GCP console.

  2. Modify the access control of your function so that only your Google account can invoke the function.

  3. Investigate the logs of your function invocations in Google Cloud's operations suite. Try to understand what each log entry indicates.