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Serverless Containers with Google Cloud Run

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Re: Serverless Containers with Google Cloud Run

#11
post #6

The biggest issue I saw when evaluating Google Cloud Run *(for containers) is that a container needs to have an external IP address in order to access a managed database. I hope they address this soon!

Curious as to why having an external IP/URL is a problem. If you're using almost any cloud service that has an API for adminstration (e.g. an API to tear down a VM), then is that really different to a public endpoint secured with platform-managed authentication? (which Cloud Run provides). Is it because you need firewall rules?

Many organizations insist on making everything private, i.e. running on an RFC1918 IP address, within the corporate 'perimeter', cloud included.

True, a cloud has an API, and that tends to be public rather than private, and that doesn't play well with the above approach.

There are some band-aids for this, such as Google Cloud's VPC service controls, which restricts which clients can access the Cloud API, providing a second layer of defence to IAM.

Personally I find this approach retrograde, because it assigns an element of trust to entities within the perimeter, whereas the BeyondCorp zero-trust approach does not, and plays well with the way public clouds have been designed (public endpoints).

Re: Serverless Containers with Google Cloud Run

#12
post #5

It would depend on the time to get a service to respond when scaled to zero. Otherwise it seems to be twice the cost of fargate with AWS, if you need to have it running all the time to get reasonable response times.

It doesn't "exactly" work that way. The instance doesn't disappear after the request is served. It hangs around in case there's another request (for a while), but you only pay while the request is active. In practice "cold starts" are single-digit percentage of most common workloads (# of requests that are cold). Also FWIW it's not just scale to 0. Scaling any number of instances up will hit cold starts, the differen…

These averages that always get dropped to alleviate all concern tell me that serverless container cold starts will never be solved.

No platform will sweat to improve the start time of an environment 10x, not when it only affects Individual end-users must occasionally endure the waking up of successive microservices and devs must risk a bad first impression.

Re: Serverless Containers with Google Cloud Run

#14
1. EKS + Fargate > Google Cloud Run (because you can run microservices that communicate with each other as opposed to tasks)

2. KNative, which Google open sourced, is the basis of Google Cloud Run. There is an issue on Virtual Kubelet repo to support KNative, so we can have Kops + Virtual Kubelet + KNative instead of EKS + Fargate.

3. Pods as a service (EKS + Fargate or eventually Kops + Virtual Kubelet + KNative, and maybe for now Kops + Virtual Kubelet + Fargate) is not mutually exclusive with respect to CaaS. The former is a superset of the latter but they serve different purposes.

Re: Serverless Containers with Google Cloud Run

#15
post #10

For those like me looking for a comparison point: > In some sense you can compare it to AWS Fargate and Azure Container Instances. But the difference here is that Cloud Run will actually automatically scale to zero, and you only pay for resources during a request. This seems really cool. On the one hand, I appreciate the simplicity of serverless "Cloud CGI" as it were. But on the other hand, I have been confused why…

You should be able to put any binary into a docker container for cloud run.

That was my point; Cloud Run seems suited for my needs.
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