News

Google Cloud Functions Supports .NET Core 3.1 (but not .NET 5)

Google Cloud Functions -- often used for serverless, event-driven projects -- now supports .NET, but the new support is a release behind Microsoft's latest .NET offering.

On Nov. 19, Google announced support for .NET Core 3.1 in its Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform, but that was more than a week after Microsoft shipped the GA version of .NET Core 3.1's successor, .NET 5.

Cloud Functions helps users create single-purpose, stand-alone functions that respond to events such as user interactions or triggers, with the provider taking care of managing servers and runtime environments.

"With Cloud Functions for .NET, now in Preview, you can use .NET Core 3.1 to build business-critical applications and integration layers, and deploy the function in a fully managed environment, complete with access to resources in a private VPC network," Google said. ".NET functions scale automatically based on your load. You can write HTTP functions to respond to HTTP events, and CloudEvent functions to process events sourced from various cloud and Google Cloud services including Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage and Firestore."

Google Cloud Functions
[Click on image for larger view.] Google Cloud Functions (source: Google).

In addition to C#, coders can use F# and Visual Basic to write cloud functions, in conjunction with the Functions Framework for .NET, an open source FaaS framework for creating portable .NET functions. "With Functions Framework you develop and run your functions locally, then deploy them to Cloud Functions, or to another .NET environment," Google said."

That framework includes a template package for use from the command line or Visual Studio, and the templates support VB and F# also.

With the new .NET support for serverless computing, Google Cloud is somewhat catching up to industry leader Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has supported .NET in its AWS Lambda offering for years.

The other "Big 3" cloud provider, Microsoft Azure, naturally supports .NET in its serverless offering, Azure Functions, though .NET Core 3.1 support only arrived in January.

For working with the new .NET Core 3.1 support in Cloud Functions, Google published a .NET Quickstart and pointed to "A Tour of the .NET Functions Framework" written by Jon Skeet.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Cloud-Focused .NET Aspire 9.1 Released

    Along with .NET 10 Preview 1, Microsoft released.NET Aspire 9.1, the latest update to its opinionated, cloud-ready stack for building resilient, observable, and configurable cloud-native applications with .NET.

  • Microsoft Ships First .NET 10 Preview

    Microsoft shipped .NET 10 Preview 1, introducing a raft of improvements and fixes across performance, libraries, and the developer experience.

  • C# Dev Kit Previews .NET Aspire Orchestration

    Microsoft's dev team has been busy updating the C# Dev Kit, a Visual Studio Code extension that enhances the C# development experience by providing tools for managing, debugging, and editing C# projects.

  • Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

    New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.

  • Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events