Episode 04: Show Notes

This week we talk about the 5th on the series of blog entries from the Developers and Practitioners big: Avoiding GCF anti-patterns part 5: How to run background processes correctly in Python.

This post identifies problems where python code calls standard libraries to put processing in the background. While this is a common practice in data centers or on the developer’s box, in a server less environment this does not work correctly.

If there is a need to have processing separate from the main thread of execution, you should use tools such a Cloud Tasks to spin off the processing.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Code is executing in a sandbox, not a machine. Forks don’t work the way you expect
• Rather than break off threads to execute, use more instantiations of the code, or hand off execution to another Cloud Function via Cloud Tasks
• Make sure you are doing code reviews to catch problems like this early
• Some speculation on the upcoming AWS re:Invent.