Yep, great questions actually. Doing it this way keeps the secret as secure as doing it inline on each request -- either way, the secret will only be stored as a variable in the memory of the execution environment, it's just a matter of whether that variable is scoped to the function or not, which doesn't make a difference here.
With regards to the Functions Framework, it behaves exactly like the Cloud Functions runtime, so you shouldn't see any difference in behavior if you use the framework vs. the vanilla runtime.
With regards to pricing: anything done outside the function itself happens once per instance per cold start, so moving as much execution outside the function itself should reduce the overall compute time across all invocations of your function.
Thanks Dustin, this helps clarify things a lot more. I'm having trouble translating this to node.js though (which is what I'm needing to use due to other API's we use having only js helper libraries) given the async structure of js. So I'm wondering whether this kind of global scoping so that certain functions run only at instance cold start is not possible with js. If you have any info on that please let me know. Thanks!
Sweet! Wow, great timing hahaha. You weren't kidding with the just published part (today). This totally helped clarify the way things should be setup in the node environment. Thanks for sharing and taking the time to comment back!
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Yep, great questions actually. Doing it this way keeps the secret as secure as doing it inline on each request -- either way, the secret will only be stored as a variable in the memory of the execution environment, it's just a matter of whether that variable is scoped to the function or not, which doesn't make a difference here.
With regards to the Functions Framework, it behaves exactly like the Cloud Functions runtime, so you shouldn't see any difference in behavior if you use the framework vs. the vanilla runtime.
With regards to pricing: anything done outside the function itself happens once per instance per cold start, so moving as much execution outside the function itself should reduce the overall compute time across all invocations of your function.
Thanks Dustin, this helps clarify things a lot more. I'm having trouble translating this to node.js though (which is what I'm needing to use due to other API's we use having only js helper libraries) given the async structure of js. So I'm wondering whether this kind of global scoping so that certain functions run only at instance cold start is not possible with js. If you have any info on that please let me know. Thanks!
Hey Anthony, one of my colleagues just published a similar guide for Node, hopefully this helps! dev.to/googlecloud/serverless-myst...
Sweet! Wow, great timing hahaha. You weren't kidding with the just published part (today). This totally helped clarify the way things should be setup in the node environment. Thanks for sharing and taking the time to comment back!