This is the Archived version of the documentation. The free trial period ended on Sept. 30, 2021.

See the GA version documentation for details about installing Cloud Run for Anthos as an Anthos fleet component with Anthos Service Mesh.

Choosing a Cloud Run for Anthos platform

This page provides details to help you choose your Cloud Run for Anthos platform. Cloud Run for Anthos gives you the flexibility to run services on a fully managed environment or on Anthos. If you're already using Anthos, Cloud Run for Anthos can easily deploy into your Anthos GKE cluster or on-premises workloads. Plus, you can easily switch from Cloud Run to Cloud Run for Anthos or vice versa; all without changing your application code.

One way to visualize the differences in platform at a high-level architectural view:

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Cloud Run

The Cloud Run platform allows you to deploy stateless containers without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Your workloads are automatically scaled out or in to zero depending on the traffic to your app. You only pay when your app is running, billed to the nearest 100 milliseconds.

Cloud Run for Anthos

Cloud Run for Anthos abstracts away complex Kubernetes concepts, allowing developers to easily leverage the benefits of Kubernetes and serverless together. It provides access to custom machine types, additional networking support, and Cloud Accelerators. It allows you to run your workloads on-premises or on Google Cloud.

Comparison table

The follow table shows some key differences between the platforms:

Cloud Run Cloud Run for Anthos
Pricing Pay-per-use Included as part of either Google Kubernetes Engine or Anthos.
Machine types Limited CPU and Memory. Standard or custom machine types on Anthos, including GPUs.
Autoscaling Up to 1,000 container instances by default, can be increased via a Quota increase. Limited by the capacity of your Anthos GKE cluster.
Identity and policy Manage the identities that are allowed to invoke each service (or allow unauthenticated invocations). Publish services to the internet or make them available to cluster or VPC network only.
Networking Access to VPC / Compute Engine network via Serverless VPC Access. Services are not part of the Istio service mesh. Access to VPC / Compute Engine network. Services participate in the Istio service mesh.
URLs Automatic service URLs and SSL certificates. Custom domains only with manual SSL certificates.
Container isolation Strict container isolation based on gVisor sandbox. Default Kubernetes container isolation.
Execution environments Fully managed on Google infrastructure. Anthos on Google Cloud
Anthos deployed on VMware (on-premises).