Chapter 12. Cloud Functions: serverless applications
This chapter covers
- What are microservices?
- What is Google Cloud Functions?
- Creating, deploying, updating, triggering, and deleting functions
- Managing function dependencies
- How pricing works for Google Cloud Functions
A “microservice architecture” is a way of building and assembling an application that keeps each concrete piece of the application as its own loosely coupled part (called a microservice). Each microservice can stand on its own, whereas a traditional application has many parts that are intertwined with one another, incapable of running independently.
For example, when creating a typical application, you’d start a project and then start adding controllers to handle the different parts of the application. When building the To-Do List application, you might start by adding the ability to sign up and log in, and then add more functionality such as creating to-do lists, then creating items on those lists, searching through all the lists for matching items, and more. In short, this big application would be a single code base, running on a single server somewhere, where each server was capable of doing all of those actions because it’s just different functionality added to a single application.