'Run Google Cloud Function at a specific time

I'd like to schedule the execution of a Cloud Function to a specific time. It should be run only once.

I basically have a function "startTask" which modifies some data in the Firestore database. After X seconds (the time is passed to the startTask function), the "finishTask" function should be called.

I already tried messing around with Google Cloud Tasks but I feel like this isn't the right way to go.

Solution 1:^[1]

Google Cloud does not have service that will do what you need that I am aware of. If you need X to happen N seconds after user does Y, you will need to code that service yourself.

You do not specify what services you are using for compute (App Engine, Compute Engine, Kubernetes, etc.) but writing a task secheduling service in just about any language is not very hard. There are many ways to accomplish this (client side code / server side code). Many OS / language combinations support scheduling a function with a timeout and callback.

Solution 2:^[2]

You can use Cloud Tasks. It will allow you to be alerted after x amount of seconds. https://cloud.google.com/tasks/docs/creating-http-target-tasks

Solution 3:^[3]

The easiest way is to create a pub/sub topic, cron-topic that your cloud function subscribes to. Cloud Scheduler can push an event to cron-topic on a schedule

Create the Topic & Subscription

gcloud pubsub topics create cron-topic
# create cron-sub for testing.  Function will create it's own subscription
gcloud pubsub subscriptions create cron-sub --topic cron-topic

Create the Schedule

Command is below, but since it's beta, see the console guide here

# send a message every 3 hours. For testing use `0/2 * * * *` for every 2 min
gcloud beta scheduler jobs create pubsub --topic=cron-topic --schedule='0 */3 * * *'

Create a Function to Consume the `cron-topic` Topic

Put your function code in the current directory and use this command to deploy the function listening to the cron-topic topic

FUNCTION_NAME=cron-topic-listener
gcloud functions deploy ${FUNCTION_NAME} --runtime go111 --trigger-topic cron-topic

note pub/sub events are sent at least once. In some cases the event can be sent more than once. Make sure your function is idempotent

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution	Source
Solution 1	John Hanley
Solution 2
Solution 3	Anthony Metzidis

'Run Google Cloud Function at a specific time

Solution 1:[1]

Solution 2:[2]

Solution 3:[3]