Cloud Run adds min instances feature for latency-sensitive apps • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloud Run adds min instances feature for latency-sensitive apps

#51

Post by nojvek » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

justicezyx wrote: post #27

davidspiess wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems they want to replace their managed AppEngine service through Cloud Run in the long run.

Cloud run is developed by the same team that built AppEngine. They share the same technical leadership and a lot of the technical stacks, for example, billing and security (gVisor). I dont think it's that simple to replace one service with another. It requires a lot of very sensitive dealing with external customers. And one cannot (easily) use the typical "Google deprecation" on a Cloud service offering, either. So i…

I’d imagine google would at-least make both appEngine run on the same core primitives that cloud run uses. So while the public facing api is the same, the internals are replaced. At-least that’s how I’d approach it. Deprecate app-engine in that it will be infinitely supported until the last customer, but all new stuff is advocated to be used on cloud run.

Re: Cloud Run adds min instances feature for latency-sensitive apps

#52

Post by nojvek » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 5:35 AM UTC

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #8

I wonder how this compares to Cloudflare Workers Unbound https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-workers-unbound/

Cloudflare workers both bundled and unbound run on v8 isolates. While they’re performant you can only use JavaScript. Js that works with cloudflare’s v8 version.

With google cloud run it’s effectively running your container. You can use whatever language you want, whatever apt dependencies you need, whatever Linux flavor (ubuntu/alpine/busybox) e.t.c

In that sense cloud run is the more generic serverless platform. The devs can indeed say “it works on my machine, so let’s ship my machine and scale it up as needed and hibernate when not in use”

Re: Cloud Run adds min instances feature for latency-sensitive apps

#53

Post by nojvek » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 5:38 AM UTC

intellix wrote: post #41

Does this open the door to having websockets on cloud run?

No cloud run is only for http requests only. Not even push. You want to use this for short lived requests. Web sockets need more persistent connections.

Although may be there is a way I don’t know.

Re: Cloud Run adds min instances feature for latency-sensitive apps

#54

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 5:39 AM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #48

Yesssss. Right now I have a cron that hits my app every minute to keep it warm. However even with that I see cold starts every now and then. This removed that problem. It’s so surprising that AWS and Azure don’t have an equivalent to GCP cloud run. Being able to run a container on demand with a custom image with whatever language and dependencies you want is amazing. I’ve spun up browsers for snapshotting and seeing…

[deleted]

Re: Cloud Run adds min instances feature for latency-sensitive apps

#55

Post by nojvek » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 5:40 AM UTC

jpochtar wrote: post #5

Does this apply to Firebase functions as well?

Firebase functions is essentially same as google cloud functions. In my personal experience cloud run starts up much faster compared to cloud functions even on a cold start. The min instances feature makes it even faster.

Re: Cloud Run adds min instances feature for latency-sensitive apps

#56

Post by nojvek » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 5:43 AM UTC

wdb wrote: post #32

Axsuul wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. App Engine is nothing like Cloud Functions/Run. The former is a better fit for your entire app stack (think Heroku) while the latter is for ad-hoc. As for Cloud Functions and Cloud Run, the way you deploy is completely different. Cloud Run is strictly meant for containers.

I would be interested in something like AWS Lambda@Edge or Cloud Workers from Google. Love to run a simple script close the visitor's location e.g. from Belgium DC instead of US DC etc

That would be nice although Google CDN even without any compute is pretty slow compared to cloudflare.

Google has many data centers around the world. I don’t see why they can have cloud run automatically select the data center closest to the user and spin up the container there. That would deffo solve a lot of problems.

Re: Cloud Run adds min instances feature for latency-sensitive apps

#57

Post by intellix » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 5:48 AM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #53

intellix wrote: post #41

Does this open the door to having websockets on cloud run?

No cloud run is only for http requests only. Not even push. You want to use this for short lived requests. Web sockets need more persistent connections. Although may be there is a way I don’t know.

It was a limitation before but maybe not soon (they would have already mentioned it).

Knative in your own cluster supports it but I want scale to zero instead of paying for a cluster.

They say that it supports sockets but not bi-directional. You can't send messages back up the socket which we're using for GQL mutations

Re: Cloud Run adds min instances feature for latency-sensitive apps

#58

Post by jtsiskin » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 6:43 AM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #48

Yesssss. Right now I have a cron that hits my app every minute to keep it warm. However even with that I see cold starts every now and then. This removed that problem. It’s so surprising that AWS and Azure don’t have an equivalent to GCP cloud run. Being able to run a container on demand with a custom image with whatever language and dependencies you want is amazing. I’ve spun up browsers for snapshotting and seeing…

Yeah this setup is the biggest advantage I see to the cloud vs self hosted - the possibility of far more efficient resource usage due to things like cloud run, lambda, etc.

I dream of a day when the underlying “cloud” is completely commoditized and interoperable, and your code will run wherever is cheapest, and the cost actually becomes less than self hosting.

Re: Cloud Run adds min instances feature for latency-sensitive apps

#59

Post by digianarchist » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 7:19 AM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #48

Yesssss. Right now I have a cron that hits my app every minute to keep it warm. However even with that I see cold starts every now and then. This removed that problem. It’s so surprising that AWS and Azure don’t have an equivalent to GCP cloud run. Being able to run a container on demand with a custom image with whatever language and dependencies you want is amazing. I’ve spun up browsers for snapshotting and seeing…

AWS added container support to Lambda recently.

Re: Cloud Run adds min instances feature for latency-sensitive apps

#60

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 7:19 AM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #49

Compared to AWS, the big thing cloud run and cloud functions are missing is per millisecond billing. Per 100ms billing is too wide grained. AWS lambda has per ms billing and it makes a big difference if your using a perf optimized language like golang or rust.

[deleted]