Google Cloud Run is Google's fully managed solution for running containerized, serverless applications. After a six-month beta phase, Cloud Run is now generally available, along with Cloud Run for Anthos, which enables running your Google Cloud Run application on premises using a Google Kubernetes Engine cluster.
Cloud Run brings the best of both serverless and containers together. It allows you to write code in any language you choose, using any binary, without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure.
Google Cloud Run automatically takes care of starting and stopping containers that can handle incoming requests, and only bills for the resources actually used. Since containers are started and stopped automatically, they associated applications within them must be stateless to be able to work correctly on Google Cloud Run.
Being based on Knative, Google Cloud Run applications can be easily moved to any Cloud platform that supports this serverless style framework, thus minimizing the risks of lock-in. Google Cloud Run can also be deployed on Google Anthos, which is a collection of services and tools to easily manage Kubernetes applications on premises or in the cloud in a consistent way.
With Cloud Run for Anthos, developers can more easily write serverless applications and deploy them to the Anthos cluster without having to learn Kubernetes concepts first. Cloud Run for Anthos takes care of scaling your application instances up or down, even down to zero, depending on traffic.
Google is mostly aiming Anthos at organizations that want to transition their legacy applications to the cloud. Using Google Cloud Run for Anthos allows developers to build microservices running on premises that talk to existing services, and transition them to the Cloud when they are ready.
As mentioned in our previous coverage, Google Cloud Run is not a Function as a Service (FaaS) solution, as it is aimed at running a full application in a container, rather than running small functions that delegate many common responsibilities to the managed infrastructure. Furthermore, Google Cloud Run leaves developers free to choose their own stack to build their apps, while FaaS platform tends to limit the number of options developers have. As a final note, Google Cloud Run uses gVisor as a sandbox technology to prevent privilege escalation across containers running on the same host.