Learning how to build serverless functions

In this section, we will investigate how to build serverless functions for one of the public cloud providers. Although Amazon AWS pioneered serverless functions in 2014 by offering AWS Lambda functions, we will use the Google Cloud Functions platform for our example functions. The reason for this is that we already introduced GCP in great detail in previous chapters, and you can leverage the same GCP account for the deployment of these example functions. However, we strongly recommend that you use the other platforms, especially if you are planning to use their serverless functions in the future. The core principles of building and deploying these functions on various cloud platforms are the same.

GCP Cloud Functions offers several ways in which to develop and deploy serverless functions (going forward, we will call them Cloud Functions in the context of GCP). We will explore two types of events in our example Cloud Functions, which can...