Cannon Access

14 Aug 2017

Google Cloud Functions Environment

I’ve been having a great deal of fun recently playing with Google’s Firebase cloud service. In particular, the Google Cloud Functions are pretty amazing. Yes, I’m aware of AWS Lambda, and I’ve written code for it while working for Instructure, (which I assume is still being used in production today). However, Amazon’s Lambda is a huge pain to get working. Well actually, it’s more accurate to say that API gateway is the painful part. Firebase Functions, on the other hand, are a breeze. Anyway, the whole idea with serverless functions is that you don’t have to worry about the machine. Just push your code, pick your CPU and memory requirements, and you’re good to go. However, in practice, it can often be handy to know a little more about the environment. For example, I wanted to know if the bzip2 command was available. Of course, that got me wondering what else might be available, or missing. So, I wrote a little scfuncon to give me this information.

If you’re curious, here’s the code:

And here are the results, parsed and sorted: