Random and fake test data in Sheets with Google Apps Script

[Bruce Mcpherson]

Sometimes you need to generate some fake data for a spreadsheet. In this post I’ll cover a few utilities in 2 separate libraries that can help with this.

https://ramblings.mcpher.com/gassnippets2/apps-script-random-fake/

[Alex]

I also use this. And I thought about a simple addon for this.

[Bruce Mcpherson]

Alex

If you mean 'faker', it's a pretty big library 1.5mb minimized and it might not be a great candidate for a permanent add-on dependency. Might be better in a cloud run environment with an API.

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[Alex]

That is the place where I stuck!

I thought about distributed system. And now I'm thinking about GCF. But my experience with Cloud Functions gives me a tip that it can be expensive. Therefore, I am considering a cloud run and a common virtual server.

[Bruce Mcpherson]

There's a pretty generous free tier, and you can put a budget on it so it doesn't runaway. 

The advantage of cloud run over cloud functions  with a big module like this, is in startup time. Cloud run has some global variable persistence so each call doesn't necessarily generate a completely new cold start instance. 

check this out..

https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/tips/general

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[Alex]

That's it!

And I'd like ask you an additional question. How do you think what is the best benefits for use GCF with Apps Scripts? I notice that I'm using CF by inertia from my experience with Firebase.

[Bruce Mcpherson]

One factor would be that you already have a node app or container to perform some self contained function or to run something that only works on node, or you want to use pubsub and/or cloud storage, or of course if you are using firestore/firebase, or if you have something that would take too long to run on Apps Script and want to split it into one or multiple simultaneously executing chunks. 

btw - I normally use regular cloud functions rather than involving firebase.

cloud run is a bit more complicated than cloud functions to work with. If you are running kubernetes, you can execute cloud run on your own cluster which avoids a lot of faffing around with security stuff. 

Here's how..

https://ramblings.mcpher.com/gcp/google-cloud-run-on-kubernetes/

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[Alex]

Thank you!

Also is bmFaker updated automatically? Is a GitHub Action?

[Bruce Mcpherson]

No - its a clone so I'd need to update it from time to time

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