News

Google Cloud API Gateway for Serverless Computing in Public Beta

• By David Ramel
• 09/18/2020

Google Cloud announced a public beta of an API Gateway used for its serverless computing scheme in which the cloud platform takes care of infrastructure setup and management.

In serverless computing, Wikipedia says, the cloud provider runs the server while dynamically allocating machine resources, with users paying only for those resources used.

Google's documentation explains its serverless platform lets users:

• Deploy functions or apps as source code or as containers
• Build full stack serverless applications with Google Cloud's storage, databases, machine learning, and more
• Extend applications with event-driven computing from Google or third-party service integrations
• Choose to move serverless workloads to on-premises environments or to the cloud

In announcing the API Gateway, Google noted the trend of packaging serverless workloads as easy-to-use APIs, which can be shared internally or publicly over the web. This model provides security, analytics and monitoring benefits.

"To help developers focus on building code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure, we are excited to announce the beta of API Gateway -- a fully-managed Google Cloud offering that lets you create, secure, and monitor APIs for your serverless workloads," Google said in a blog post.

"Using the new API Gateway, developers can easily package multiple services into easy-to-use APIs while making it easy for consumers to access through a single interface. For example, a company that focuses on weather data may build capabilities for weather alerts, forecasting, history, and locations as four different services. But with an API Gateway, end-users can just use a weather API to access all of these services through a single access point."

According to the API Gateway web site, those APIs can be used for platform services such as:

• Cloud Functions: Scalable pay-as-you-go functions as a service (FaaS) to run code with zero server management
• Cloud Run: Fully managed compute platform for deploying and scaling containerized applications quickly and securely
• App Engine: For building highly scalable applications on a fully managed serverless platform
• Compute Engine: Computing infrastructure in predefined or custom machine sizes to accelerate cloud transformations
• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): Secured and managed Kubernetes service with four-way auto scaling and multi-cluster support

Google Cloud issues public betas to broaden customer testing and use for a product or service that's in development, typically without SLAs or technical support obligations. However, the API Gateway public beta does come with costs.