Building Serverless Applications with Google Cloud Run

Chapter 3. Building Containers

In Chapter 2, I showed you how to deploy my sample container image on Cloud Run. If you want to deploy your code to Cloud Run, you need to build your code into a container image and push it to Artifact Registry to deploy (Figure 3-1). This chapter will show you how to do that.

Figure 3-1. The full development workflow

Artifact Registry is a product on Google Cloud that helps you host and distribute container images and other build artifacts such as npm and Maven packages. You’ll need to create a repository to store the container images you’ll create while working through the book.

I’ll start by explaining container technology from first principles. It will be a great introduction if you’re just getting started with containers; if you’re already an expert, it’s a useful review of what you already know.

With the fundamental concepts covered, I’ll show you various approaches to turn your source code into a container image. I’ll start with Docker, which offers a relatively low-level experience, and show you how to store your local container image in Artifact Registry on Google Cloud.

I will follow up with three alternatives to Docker that require (almost) no configuration. If you’ve ever struggled to create a small, secure image while trying to learn Docker from scratch (I know I have), you will love this last part.

Finally, I’ll demonstrate the various ...