Cloud Functions as a service host?

[Michael Johnson]

What would be the pros & cons of attempting to use Cloud Functions as a host for an entire application service?  It seems like most of the documentation and examples imply that it should be used primarily for one-off operations like event triggers, etc.  But I'm wondering if it's feasible to use it to essentially host a Node.js REST service.

[Doug Stevenson]

That's certainly one of the intended use cases for Cloud Functions.  It should be pretty easy to make use of an Express app that handles all your API endpoints.  This might be of interest to you (even if it seems small): https://github.com/firebase/functions-samples/tree/master/isomorphic-react-app

Doug