Building Serverless Applications with Google Cloud Run

Chapter 2. Understanding Cloud Run

Now that you’ve read Chapter 1, you’re ready to deploy your first container on Cloud Run. This chapter offers a practical exploration of Cloud Run. I’ll start with the prerequisites and the tooling you need to install on your local machine. You’ll deploy a sample container, upgrade it to a new version, and change its configuration. I’ll also illustrate some of the more advanced features.

Once you’ve had your first experience working with Cloud Run, it will be time for a more fundamental discussion of the platform and its runtime characteristics. Running a container on Cloud Run is not the same as running that container on a traditional, always-on server. Cloud Run is request driven, uses disposable containers, and supports fast autoscaling. I will tell you what that means, how that helps you build reliable and scalable applications, and what the consequences are for your application design.

I’ll close the chapter with a discussion of alternative ways to run application logic on Google Cloud using a serverless model and share my speculations about the future of Cloud Run with you.

Getting Started with Google Cloud

To work along with the examples in this book, you need to create a Google Cloud account, create a project, and install the Google Cloud CLI on your local machine.

You can sign up here for a Google Cloud account. There is a free trial with credits waiting for you, but you need to set up payment details. Google Cloud uses your information ...