Function Creation

This page describes how to create functions within Cloud Functions.

Functions can be created in one of two ways:

1. Custom Container

   • Enables any container-based workload as long as the container exposes an inference endpoint and a health check.
   • Option to leverage any server, ex. PyTriton, FastAPI, Triton.
   • See Container-Based Function Creation.

2. Helm Chart

   • Enables orchestration across multiple containers. For complex use cases where a single container isn’t flexible enough.
   • Requires one “mini-service” container defined as the inference entry point for the function.
   • Does not support partial response reporting, gRPC or HTTP streaming-based invocation.
   • See Helm-Based Function Creation.

Additionally, Cloud Functions supports Low Latency Streaming (LLS) functions for video, audio, and data streaming via WebRTC.

Best Practices

Container Versioning

• Ensure that any resources that you tag for deployment into production environments are not simply using “latest” and are following a standard version control convention.

  • During autoscaling, a function scaling any additional instances will pull the same specificed container image and version. If version is set to “latest”, and the “latest” container image is updated between instance scaling, this can lead to undefined behavior.

• Function versions created are immutable, this means that the container image and version cannot be updated for a function without creating a new version of the function.

Security

• Do not run containers as root user: Running containers as root is not supported in Cloud Functions. Always specify a non-root user in your Dockerfile using the USER instruction.
• Use Kubernetes Secrets: For sensitive information like API keys, credentials, or tokens, use Kubernetes Secrets instead of environment variables. This provides better security and follows Kubernetes best practices for secret management.

Available Container Variables

The following is a reference of available variables via the headers of the invocation message (auto-populated by Cloud Functions), accessible within the container.

For examples of how to extract and use some of these variables, see NVCF Container Helper Functions.

Environment Variables

The following environment variables are automatically injected into your function containers when they are deployed and can be accessed using standard environment variable access methods in your application code: