With IoT computing likely in mind, Google recently announced their Cloud Run service offering. In a nutshell, Cloud Run is a “serverless” infrastructure that lets developers take advantage of containers as needed without having to be concerned with the normal physical infrastructure. For the IoT development community, this makes perfect sense since developers need only sporadic compute power. This serverless model does seem to be picking up interest in the developer space. The article that follows implies that developers will prefer it to Amazon’s Lambda platform, although market acceptance of Lambda to date would indicate otherwise.
One downside of paying a cloud computing vendor to manage a lot of your computing infrastructure is that if you ever want to switch providers, it promises to be painful. Google hopes that its latest serverless computing product will provide a little more freedom.
Cloud Run will let developers deploy applications packaged inside stateless Docker containers to Google Cloud without having to set up and manage those containers on cloud hardware, paying only for the computing resources they use down to the hundred-millisecond of use. It appears similar to Fargate, Amazon Web Services’ managed container service, and Microsoft’s Azure Container Instances, and Google is expected to release more details on the service Tuesday during the first day of its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco.
