Cloud Run, a managed Knative service, is GA

We want to empower developers no matter where their businesses are in their cloud journey, whether that's on-prem, operating in a managed Kubernetes environment, or running on a fully managed serverless computing platform. Today, we're announcing that Cloud Run is generally available, helping developers focus on writing high-value code, regardless of where their organizations are on the path to the cloud. Specifically, we’re announcing:

• Cloud Run, a fully managed serverless execution environment that lets you run stateless HTTP-driven containers, without worrying about the infrastructure.

• Cloud Run for Anthos, which lets you deploy Cloud Run applications into an Anthos GKE cluster running on-prem or in Google Cloud.

• Our commitment to Knative, the open API and runtime environment on which Cloud Run is based, bringing workload portability and the serverless developer experience to your Kubernetes clusters, wherever they may be.

Cloud Run fully managed

Cloud Run brings the best of both serverless and containers together. It allows you to write code in any language you choose, using any binary, without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. Cloud Run offers a natively serverless experience that lets you go from container to URL within seconds, for increased developer velocity. You’re also charged only for the resources used, billed to the nearest 100 milliseconds. And Cloud Run workloads are totally portable: you can run them fully managed on Google Cloud, on Anthos running on-premises, or Anthos running on Google Cloud, or on a third-party cloud platform that supports Knative. 

Customers such as Narvar, a post-purchase platform for retailers, are already leveraging the benefits of fully managed Cloud Run.

"Google Cloud Run accelerated our developer velocity by 3X by enabling our developers to create new services at scale with ZERO dev-ops involvement. Just as important, Cloud Run helped us create a net-new product and business model, previously not possible because of the constraints of other solutions.” - Ram Ravichandran, CTO Narvar

As a managed compute platform, Cloud Run is production-ready out of the box with monitoring and logging powered by Stackdriver, all integrated into Cloud Console. Cloud Run also has first-class integration with gcloud, GCP’s CLI experience, giving you a consistent interface for deploying and managing Cloud Run services across these platforms.

Cloud Run for Anthos

If your organization wants to leverage Kubernetes to modernize and optimize its existing resources, the combination of Anthos and Cloud Run for Anthos can help smooth that transition, so you can modernize in place. With Cloud Run for Anthos, developers can more easily write serverless applications and deploy them to the Anthos cluster without having to learn Kubernetes concepts first. Cloud Run for Anthos takes care of scaling your application instances up or down, even down to zero depending on traffic.

Cloud Run for Anthos also lets you future-proof your applications. If you want to modernize an on-prem legacy application in place or extend it to the cloud, Cloud Run for Anthos can simply spin up a microservice that talks privately to existing services—all running on the same Anthos cluster. And if you decide you want to move your Cloud Run for Anthos apps to the cloud, you can redeploy to the fully managed Cloud Run. You can even choose to move your workloads back to your own datacenter or another third-party cloud running a Knative-compatible environment. Here is what one of our customers, QiTech, had to say:

"Cloud Run for Anthos brings additional features like application level auto scaling to our Kubernetes clusters, making it very simple to manage the cluster to scale when needed. It takes various actions that follow Kubernetes best practices and abstracts them, allowing us to focus more on our service and less on its infrastructure." - Danilo Porto, Lead DevOps Engineer, QI Tech

We’ve also been collaborating with popular ISV partners to extend the capabilities of Cloud Run for Anthos across key areas like CI/CD, application performance monitoring (APM), and security. We’re excited to announce support from CircleCI, CloudBees, Datadog, Dynatrace, GitLab, JFrog, New Relic, Octarine, Palo Alto Networks, PureSec, Sumo Logic, and Sysdig. These partnerships mean organizations can easily integrate Cloud Run for Anthos using popular ISV solutions and still take advantage of existing tooling investments.

Cloud Run for Anthos running on Google Cloud is available as a free trial until May 14, 2020, with no additional charge beyond the cost of GKE.

Knative: the basis of Cloud Run 

Cloud Run is possible, in part, through our longstanding commitment to open source. We started Knative more than a year ago to help developers more easily write serverless applications on top of Kubernetes. Working alongside industry leaders such as IBM, Pivotal, Red Hat, SAP and TriggerMesh, we built Knative to provide the essential components you need to build, deploy and manage modern serverless workloads anywhere you choose.

The Knative project is supported by more than 100 organizations and approximately 450 individual contributors. Already, organizations such as T-Mobile are building innovative applications for production use cases with Knative. Releases over the last year have focused on codifying best practices from successful real-world Kubernetes frameworks, and collecting feedback to help ensure Knative delivers on its promise of portability and ease of use. By bringing these learnings to Cloud Run, we aim to bring the serverless developer experience to your Kubernetes cluster anywhere. 

Cloud Run, don’t walk, to serverless containers

Here at Google, we believe in the power of serverless and the benefits of containers, and give you the best of both with Cloud Run. We also believe that the tools to enable serverless containers should be built in the open, by the community. Check out our serverless quest to give Cloud Run a try. If you’re already using Cloud Run for Anthos, please upgrade your GKE cluster. It’s your journey—we’re excited to be there alongside you.