The cloud takes most of the burden off IT teams. Its managed services take over the maintenance work, leaving more room for development and innovation. The services allow faster deployment and app modification, ensure high availability by instant scaling in response to current demand, and lead to cost optimisation through the pay-as-you-use billing method.
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Compute & Serverless: the power of Google Cloud
Google Cloud offers nearly 200 managed cloud services, including virtual machines and developer platforms from the Compute & Serverless group. These services give access to Google’s almost unlimited computing power and specifications that would be costly to set up in an on-premise model.
Compute & Serverless services include:
- Compute Engine – a virtual machine platform in the Infrastructure as a Service model,
- App Engine – a development environment for creating and deploying code, with automated infrastructure maintenance processed,
- Google Kubernetes Engine – Kubernetes in the cloud, an orchestration platform for containers and clusters,
- Cloud Run – a serverless service dedicated to creating and developing applications in containers,
- Cloud Functions – a Function as a Service tool that executes functions in response to a specific event.
What is Cloud Run?
Cloud Run is a Knative-based managed cloud platform that enables rapid development and deployment of applications in containers. It’s serverless, meaning the user doesn’t have to look after any part of the infrastructure – maintenance of physical machines, software updates, load balancing, or scaling. The focus is only on writing code in any technology of their choice, using their favourite libraries or binary files.
Cloud Run features
- Any technology. Because the service operates on containers, it allows the creation of application code using any programming language (including Go, Python, Java, Ruby or Node.js), and libraries or binary files.
- Harnessing the power of containers. Cloud Run reads any container images and integrates well with technologies such as Cloud Build, Artifact Registry or Docker.
- Integration with other cloud services. As Cloud Run is part of the Google Cloud, it is relatively easy to create a single integrated environment using several services.
- No restriction to a single cloud. The service is based on Knative’s open-source technology and containers so that resources have portability, preventing cloud lock-in.
- Fully managed service. Once configured, it can be updated to manage the application environment properly.
- Instant auto-scaling. In situations of increased load, the service upscales to ensure high availability, and when traffic decreases, it reduces the number of instances, thus ensuring costs appropriate to the consumption level.
- Durability through redundancy. Resources running in Cloud Run in a regional model are continuously transferred between zones to ensure data persistence even in the face of a Google Cloud server failure.
- Security. The Binary Authorisation service allows only trusted container images to be deployed. Resources are run in isolated environments with specific identities and access levels. You can use your encrypted key for security and manage access data via the Secret Manager service.
- Control and monitoring. The service is integrated with Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace, and Error Reporting tools to ensure sound application health. The level of use of the service can be monitored in the Metrics GUI, along with logs from the containers. In addition, Cloud Run has built-in functionality to roll back a previous version of a container quickly.
Cloud Run vs Cloud Functions
Cloud Functions is a serverless environment for connecting cloud services and executing tasks. The service allows to write and deploy pieces of code that will be run in response to a particular event emitted by a GCP service or from outside the platform. The service increases the level of agility by building applications consisting of small, independent units of functionality – modules. Each focuses on performing only one activity. Cloud Functions enable users to build and deploy services at the level of a single function rather than at the level of an entire application, container or virtual machine.
Cloud Run vs App Engine
App Engine is a serverless, fully managed development platform for deploying and hosting web applications and mobile app backends created in almost any technology. App Engine is a service in the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model; as an application developer, you do not have to worry about VM configuration, scaling, load balancing or database management, as handling these areas is automated. The service provides two environments: standard, which supports common programming languages, and flexible, which allows any containerised code to be run.
Cloud Run use cases
Web portal
Using the Cloud Run service, you can create dynamically rendered HTTP webpages, involving technologies such as nginx, ExpressJS or django and have the database in Cloud SQL.
Back-office application
Administrative activities in organisations often involve working on spreadsheets or in programmes from external suppliers. With the help of Cloud Run, an application can be created to support integration between programmes and improve access management among users or the organisation’s documentation workflow.
Automatic document generation
Cloud Run combined with Cloud Scheduler allows you to build an application that automatically performs cyclical actions – for example, generating an invoice every month. As containers containing any (including your own) binary files can be deployed into Cloud Run, the application can engage PDF creation tools such as LibreOffice.
As the service is billed on a per-use basis, no charge is incurred when the application is not in use (as long as no instances are running). In the example above, Cloud Run will only be charged once a month when the invoice is generated.
Google Cloud Run pricing. How much does the service cost?
The service is billed on a pay-as-you-use model on a per-second basis. The cost includes CPU, memory, number of queries and network usage. The service has a free renewable monthly Free Tier quota.
Cloud Run cost:
- CPU: 0,00002400 USD per vCPU second
- Memory: 0,00000250 USD per GB per second
- Requests: 0,40 USD per million requests
Cloud Run Free Tier:
- up to 180 000 vCPU seconds monthly
- up to 360 000 GB per second monthly
- up to 2 mln requests monthly
To get an accurate estimate, you can use the Google Cloud calculator.
Contact us if you want to check out Cloud Run’s capabilities or explore other Google Cloud service offerings. As an official Google Cloud partner, we have certified engineers and architects on board to accompany you on every step of your cloud journey.
