Designing a Ruby Serverless Runtime

Last week, Google announced the public beta of the Ruby runtime for Cloud Functions, Google’s functions-as-a-service (FaaS) hosting platform. Ruby support has lagged a bit behind other languages over the past year or so, but now that we’ve caught up, I thought I’d share some of the design process behind the product.This article is not a traditional design document. I won’t go through the design itself step-by-step. Instead, I want to discuss some of the design issues we faced, the decisions we made, and why we made them, because it was an interesting exercise in figuring out how to fuse Ruby conventions with those of the public cloud. Some of the trade-offs we made are, I think, emblematic of the challenges the Ruby community as a whole is facing as the industry evolves.