Cloud Functions 2nd gen features

2 min readJun 1, 2023

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The 2nd generation of cloud functions come with below features.

Long Processing time

Default timeout value for http based cloud functions is increased to 60 minutes from earlier 9 minutes.
Default timeout value of event driven cloud functions is increased to 10 minutes from earlier 9 minutes.

Cloud functions now supports upto 4 vcpu from earlier 2 vcpu.
Cloud functions now supports upto 16 GB memory from earlier 8 GB of memory.

The 2nd generation of cloud function uses cloud run under the hood.
Each new deployment of a cloud function create a new revision of corresponding cloud run instance.
Once we have more than 1 revisions of cloud run instance, traffic splitting can be implemented between them.
The traffic splitting is available at cloud run instance level and not at cloud function level.
Use below gcloud commands to list various revisions for a cloud run service and then update traffic to split it between different revisions.

gcloud run revisions list ......

gcloud run services update-traffic ......

The 2nd generation of cloud function supports concurrency while the 1st generation could handle only 1 request / instance (supporting no concurrency).
This means that with 2nd generation, 1 instance can handle multiple requests.
The concurrency is supported at underlying cloud run instance level and can be set in there.
Since cloud functions supports setting min instances, we can save money by reducing min instances and adding concurrency.
Below command will set concurrency to 8.

gcloud run services update <service_name> --concurrency 8 .....

Cloud function is now integrated with 90+ services using event arc and can be triggered from events generated from these services.
For example, we can write cloud function to send email after a query execution is completed in big query.

This is all for now. Hope you will find it useful to understand key features of cloud functions 2nd gen.