Cloud Run
Fully managed serverless platform for running containerized applications with automatic scaling to zero.
Fully managed serverless platform for running containerized applications with automatic scaling to zero.
What is Cloud Run?
Google Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless platform that takes any container image and runs it with automated horizontal autoscaling (including scaling to zero when idle). Built on top of Knative open standards and Google's Borg infrastructure, Cloud Run abstracts away all cluster management, load balancer provisioning, and TLS certificate renewal, letting developers deploy production-ready web services in seconds.
Decision Guide: When to Choose This Service
Use Cloud Run for REST APIs, web apps, microservices, webhook handlers, asynchronous event processing, and batch jobs written in ANY programming language that can be packaged into a standard OCI container.
Do NOT use Cloud Run for stateful workloads requiring local persistent file storage, or continuous low-level network packet inspection requiring raw TCP sockets without HTTP/gRPC/WebSockets.
Core Architectural Pillars
When traffic drops to zero, active container instances terminate, resulting in $0 compute charges.
A single container instance can handle hundreds of concurrent requests simultaneously, dramatically reducing cost compared to 1-request-per-instance models (AWS Lambda).
Container images are stored in Google Artifact Registry (`LOCATION-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/REPO/IMAGE:TAG`). Cloud Run pulls images using `roles/artifactregistry.reader` with zero external image exposure.
Every deployment creates an immutable Revision. You can split traffic (e.g. 90% v1, 10% v2) for canary releases and blue/green deployments.
Strong multi-tenant security isolation intercepting Linux kernel system calls.
Services serve continuous HTTP/gRPC traffic with autoscaling; Jobs execute batch scripts, migrations, and parallel tasks to completion.
Cloud Run functions (formerly Cloud Functions 2nd gen) is an event-driven function wrapper built directly on top of Cloud Run infrastructure.