Serverless aficionados rejoice: Google has made Cloud Run, a serverless offering for stateless containers that can be invoked through HTTP requests, available as a beta. The foundation of the platform, which had been in alpha since August 2018, is Knative. Google introduced the Kubernetes-based project last summer to help with building, deploying, and managing serverless workloads.

Cloud Run is meant to take care of infrastructure concerns, provisioning, scaling, and configuring servers depending on the workload. Customers who prefer running their containers in their Google Kubernetes Engine cluster but are still interested in the new service can try out the Cloud Run on GKE add-on.

While costs for the latter are included in GKE pricing with final conditions to be determined before the offering hits general availability, Cloud Run charges for resources used during container instance starting and request processing, rounded up to the nearest 100 millisecond.

The first 180,000 vCPU-seconds are free, as are the first 360,000 GB-seconds, two million requests, and the first 1 GB egress traffic. Beyond that, customers have to pay $0.00002400 per vCPU-seconds, $0.00000250 per GB-second, and $0.40 per million requests. Networking is free during beta, but will follow the Compute Engine networking prices for anything beyond the free quota later on.

Known issues currently include problems with JVM memory usage and a lack of support for .NET services. The add-on also has trouble with displaying request logs in the logs panel, enforcing default memory limits through the command line, and enabling default CPU limits amongst other things, so make sure to check the documentation before you run into any of those.

Google has long-been seen as the distant third in the cloud race behind AWS and Azure. However, recent reports suggest it is picking up more interest from enterprises, precisely because its Kubernetes enriched tech stack. It has also become more embracing of hybrid cloud, a move that could make it more appealing to enterprises who have no intention – or no hope of – ditching their entire legacy anytime soon.