Update : November 8, 2018

— Added new tutorial on Cloud Scheduler, an Enterprise grade Job Scheduler available in Beta now. The scheduler can be used to trigger your function at specific regular intervals.

Update: October 23–24, 2018
— Updated series for Node.js v6 and Node.js v8 runtimes.
— Added new tutorial on running headless Chrome via Puppeteer in Google Cloud Functions.
— Added new tutorial on deploying Cloud Functions from Cloud Source Repositories
— Added new tutorial on using Environment variables in Cloud Functions

This is a tutorial series on Google Cloud Functions, an Event-driven Serverless Compute Platform.

This offering lies in the Functions as a Service (FaaS) computing offering.

The series will cover the following topics:

1. Overview of the Computing Options available today, along with specific details on Serverless and Functions as a Service (FaaS) offering.
2. What is Google Cloud Functions? We look at the concepts in GCF and write our first Google Cloud Function.
3. Setting up a Local Development Environment for Google Cloud Functions. This section covers installing and setting up gcloud, Visual Studio code and a Local Emulator that lets you test your functions locally.
4. Writing Background Functions. This section covers two types of Event Providers : Google Cloud Storage and Google Pub/Sub that are currently supported as Event Providers which can trigger your Cloud Functions.
5. Monitoring Cloud Functions. This section takes a look at how you can track your logs and errors via the Stackdriver Monitoring service.
6. Local Development. This section covers how to use the gcloud tool via gcloud functions commands.
7. Local Emulator and Debugging: This section covers how to use the Local Functions Emulator to test out your functions and also how to debug your function code locally.
8. Google Cloud Functions Pricing. A look into understanding how you will be charged for this service.
9. Google Cloud Functions applications. This section contains a series of applications that demonstrate how we can write functions to create interesting and useful applications.
   — Google Chat Bot (Fetches Bitcoin Price Information)
   — Analyzing Reviews using Google Sheets and Cloud Natural Language API
10. Running Puppeteer in Google Cloud Functions: This tutorial takes you through running headless Chrome via Puppeteer and seeing how we can work with web pages and extract information from them.
11. Deploying Functions from Cloud Source Repositories: In this tutorial, we shall we how to connect your Github repository, which has all your cloud functions code and connect to Cloud Repositories, which a Git repository that is available to you in each Google Cloud Platform project. We deploy our functions directly from these repository.
12. Using Environment Variables: A look at how to use Environment variables in Google Cloud Functions.
13. Trigger Cloud Functions via Cloud Scheduler: How you can use Cloud Scheduler to trigger your functions at regular intervals. For e.g. execute my Cloud Function every hour , every week, etc.

All companion code for the tutorial series is available here. Go ahead and clone the repository or better still, Open it up in Google Cloud Shell via the button provided on the Github project page below. Do look at the README.md file in the root folder, it contains instructions on how to run tutorials in Google Cloud Shell itself.

As Google Cloud Functions continues to add more event providers and language runtimes, I hope to keep this tutorial tutorial series updated to reflect the changes and the new features.

If you have any specific feedback on the existing content and/or would like me to possibly explore covering a topic around Google Cloud Functions, do let me know in the comments or email me.

Next Part : Overview of Computing Options