Cloud Run

Cloud Run

Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless platform that runs stateless containers. You bring a container image; GCP handles scaling, load balancing, TLS, and infrastructure.

Key Characteristics

• Serverless — no VMs or clusters to manage
• Container-native — any language or runtime that fits in a Docker image
• Auto-scaling — scales from 0 to thousands of instances based on traffic
• Pay-per-use — billed only when requests are being processed

Deploying a Container

# Build and push to Google Artifact Registry
gcloud builds submit --tag gcr.io/PROJECT_ID/my-app

# Deploy to Cloud Run
gcloud run deploy my-app \
  --image gcr.io/PROJECT_ID/my-app \
  --platform managed \
  --region europe-west2 \
  --allow-unauthenticated

The --allow-unauthenticated flag makes the service publicly accessible.

Service Configuration

# Set memory and CPU
gcloud run deploy my-app \
  --image gcr.io/PROJECT_ID/my-app \
  --memory 512Mi \
  --cpu 1 \
  --min-instances 0 \
  --max-instances 100

# Set concurrency (requests per instance)
gcloud run deploy my-app \
  --image gcr.io/PROJECT_ID/my-app \
  --concurrency 80

# Set request timeout
gcloud run deploy my-app \
  --image gcr.io/PROJECT_ID/my-app \
  --timeout 300

Environment Variables

gcloud run deploy my-app \
  --image gcr.io/PROJECT_ID/my-app \
  --set-env-vars="NODE_ENV=production,LOG_LEVEL=info"

Or from a file:

gcloud run deploy my-app \
  --env-vars-file=.env.yaml

Secrets from Secret Manager

# Mount a secret as an environment variable
gcloud run deploy my-app \
  --image gcr.io/PROJECT_ID/my-app \
  --set-secrets="DB_PASSWORD=db-password:latest"

# Mount as a volume
gcloud run deploy my-app \
  --set-secrets="/secrets/db=db-password:latest"

Traffic Splitting

Cloud Run supports splitting traffic between revisions — useful for canary deployments:

gcloud run services update-traffic my-app \
  --to-revisions my-app-00001-abc=90,my-app-00002-def=10

Cloud Run vs Cloud Functions vs App Engine

Feature	Cloud Run	Cloud Functions	App Engine
Runtime	Any container	Event-driven functions	Language-specific
Scaling	0 to N instances	0 to N instances	0 to N instances
Max request timeout	60 min	9 min (HTTP)	10 min
Stateful warm-up	Yes (min-instances)	Limited	Yes
Best for	APIs, web apps	Lightweight event handlers	Traditional web apps

CI/CD with Cloud Build

cloudbuild.yaml

steps:
  - name: 'gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker'
    args: ['build', '-t', 'gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/my-app', '.']

  - name: 'gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker'
    args: ['push', 'gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/my-app']

  - name: 'gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk'
    entrypoint: gcloud
    args:
      - 'run'
      - 'deploy'
      - 'my-app'
      - '--image=gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/my-app'
      - '--region=europe-west2'
      - '--platform=managed'

Useful Commands

# List services
gcloud run services list

# Describe a service (URL, revisions, config)
gcloud run services describe my-app --region=europe-west2

# View logs
gcloud logging read "resource.type=cloud_run_revision AND resource.labels.service_name=my-app" --limit 50

# Delete a service
gcloud run services delete my-app --region=europe-west2