Building Serverless Applications with Google Cloud Run

Chapter 10. Cloud Run and Knative Serving

Cloud Run is API compatible with the open source project Knative Serving. That means that you are able to take a service from Cloud Run to Knative Serving without much (or with zero) effort.

In this chapter, I’ll show you how. I’ll walk you through installing Knative Serving on your local machine and show you how to deploy a container to both Cloud Run and your local Knative Serving using the exact same service definition.

Knative Serving is installed on top of Kubernetes, the open source container orchestrator. I’ll explain the architecture of Kubernetes so you can build a mental model of how it works and understand how Knative Service works under the hood.

As an independent open source project, Knative Serving might start to include features that are not available on Cloud Run. However, I think it’s likely that Cloud Run will always support a subset of features of Knative Serving, if not all of them.

Portability

I don’t think you should run Knative Serving on your local machine as a development environment. Docker offers a lightweight approach to orchestrating containers on your local machine with Docker Compose, as you discovered in Chapter 6.

You might wonder, then: why should I go through the trouble of this demonstration? This is why: building an application on a vendor-controlled platform carries a certain risk. Your vendor might change pricing or other terms unilaterally, making the platform less attractive for you. Portability ...