Cloud functions timeout management, use case advice

[Aurélien C]

Hi,

I have an issue with firebase functions timeout. My use case is video transcoding with ffmpeg : users upload a video, and the function is used to  create a HLS adaptive stream.

It could work pretty well, BUT there is a 60 seconds timeout, which makes all of this unusable. Some video will encode in less than 60 seconds, but many will not, resulting in aborted fonctions.

I see the timeout can be increased to 9 minutes in the google cloud console, which is a lot better, but might not be enough for some long videos. Also, the timeout can only be updated on the web console, not the command line :

$ gcloud beta functions deploy functionName --memory=512 --timeout=540

ERROR: (gcloud.beta.functions.deploy) one of the arguments --trigger-topic --trigger-bucket --trigger-http is required

My questions :

1. Is the timeout a BETA thing, or is this expected to stay ? Any ETA about it (I know this a lot to ask, especially at the beginning of the beta, but anyway :) )
   
2. Will the `firebase` command line enable timeout modification anytime soon ? 
   

If I can manage to get to 9 min timeout, I might give functions a try, otherwise it's just pointless. 

If there is a better product for my use cas in the google cloud area, I'd be happy to give it a try (I'd like to avoid keeping a server instance online all the time)

Or maybe, I can use functions for the trigger only, an then drive another server to do the encoding ? 

For example : 

1. User uploads a file, triggers firebase storage function
2. The function brings a compute instance up, which looks up in firebase database the job to do
3. Server instance shuts down by itself once the encoding is done

What do you think ? Is this doable ? Advised ?

Many thanks

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Aurelien Chivot

[Kato Richardson]

Hi Aurélien,

I can't speak to roadmaps or future plans, but this doesn't sound like an ideal use case for Functions as it stands now.

You might have better luck running the transcoding as a separate service. Maybe you could trigger the process with a DB write or with Functions, and/or trigger a function to process the results of the transcoding, but the actual transcoding sounds problematic if it's likely to exceed a minute.

☼, Kato

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Kato Richardson |

Developer Programs Eng |

kato...@google.com |

775-235-8398