The Google Front of Serverless Architecture: Google Cloud Run
Serverless architecture, which takes server installation, maintenance and modernization processes from developer teams to the responsibility of technology providers such as Google, comes to life in Google’s Cloud Run product. Through Google Cloud Run, businesses can run their containers on infrastructures that pay as much as they use.
Imagine you’re a company that holds more than 60% of the email marketing market, generating $1 billion in business with revenues that you increase by $100 million each year. Hundreds of thousands of companies of all sizes, small, medium, large, reach their followers and potential customers using the tools and infrastructure you produce.
1 billion emails are sent through your platform every day. You serve more than 200 countries and have a total of 13 million registered users. Every month, 2.4 million of those total users visit your platform.
More than 800,000 of these users have already agreed to pay you. The number of daily orders that customers using your platform receive with email marketing alone reaches 1.25 million. Now let’s ask the critical question: Do you want such a job to be interrupted, even for hours, or even minutes?
We guess the answer is “no.” And yes, for those wondering, we’re talking about Mailchimp . Mailchimp, one of the first brands that come to mind when it comes to email marketing, handles customer demands that it has to listen to every day through a technology that can carry this traffic and workload. That’s right, we’re talking about serverless architecture.
In this article, we will start by explaining the definition and advantages of serverless architecture, which we briefly mention here. Next, we’ll focus on Google’s Cloud Run solution, one of the powerful providers of serverless technology. Following the advantages of Cloud Run, we will recall its differences with App Engine, another serverless solution from Google. If you’re ready, let’s get started.
What is a serverless architecture?
Serverless architecture is a software design approach that allows developers to build, develop, and run digital services without having to manage basic infrastructure needs. In a serverless architecture, developers focus solely on writing and deploying code. The cloud provider is responsible for the operation of applications, databases and storage systems.
In traditional architecture, development teams have to maintain server hardware, deal with software and security updates, and create backups in the event of failure. Serverless architecture delegates this work to a managed service provider.
Developers take a serverless architecture approach, transferring these responsibilities to a third-party provider. On the other hand, developer teams are not interested in issues such as capacity, throughput, traffic density, and workload. Serverless architecture is scalable according to the services that businesses run in the digital environment, and the payment for this service is determined by the “pay as you go” method.
What are the advantages of serverless architecture?
Contrary to its name, serverless architecture, where servers are not completely taken out of the equation, but only abstracted for developer teams, is preferred by more than half of companies worldwide today. The main reasons behind the adoption of this technology are the following:
● Cost advantage: Businesses that adopt a serverless architecture approach are billed on a pay-as-you-go model. You don’t pay for unused servers or virtual machines. In this way, businesses only pay for the processing power they need.
● Scalability: As we mentioned earlier in the article, the performance needed in the serverless approach is automatically determined by the service provider. Instant traffic changes, periodic densities can be managed easily and without interruption.
● Productivity: Software developers who outsource infrastructure installation and maintenance to a third-party provider can easily deploy their code without having to manage servers. This enables software delivery cycles to be accelerated and operations up and running quickly.
The Google façade of serverless architecture: Google Cloud Run
Google Cloud Run is a serverless computing platform within the Google Cloud family of solutions. Google Cloud Run, which abstracts all infrastructure management due to being serverless, promises an infrastructure for running containers through requests and events.
Google Cloud Run users can build and deploy containerized applications using software development languages such as Go, Python, Java, Node.js, and .NET. Developers can run containerized applications directly on Google’s scalable infrastructure through Cloud Run. Designed to work with other applications in Google’s Cloud family of solutions, Cloud Run enables the development of full-featured web platforms and applications.
There are two ways to run scripts in Google Cloud Run. Cloud Run services are used to run code that responds to web requests or events. Cloud Run jobs, on the other hand, is used to run the resulting code that performs a job and when the job is finished.
Google Cloud Run features
Google Cloud Run, like all serverless services, operates on a pay-as-you-go model. Usage charges are per CPU and memory allocated to a container instance with a granularity of 100 milliseconds. There are two options: the request-based pricing model and the instance-based pricing model. The main features of Google Cloud Run, which is a suitable solution for websites, web applications, application development interfaces (APIs), microservices and streaming data processing projects, are as follows:
● Any language or library: With built-in support for Node.js, Go, Java, Kotlin, Scala, Python, .NET, and Docker, Google Cloud Run supports any selected programming language or operating system library.
● Leverage container workflows and standards: Cloud Run seamlessly matches container images to container ecosystems such as Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, or Docker.
● Improved developer experience: The solution offers a simple command line and user interface to quickly deploy services and products.
● Fast autoscaling: Cloud Run can automatically scale up or down depending on traffic.
● Integrated logging and monitoring: Cloud Run provides an integrated structure to Google’s solutions for monitoring application health, such as Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace and Error Reporting.
● Security: Thanks to the Binary Authorization feature, Cloud Run only distributes trusted container images. In addition, the containers can operate in an isolated secure sandbox.
Google Cloud Run vs. Google App Engine
Google Cloud Run is positioned as part of Google Cloud’s line of serverless solutions, just like Google App Engine, the details of which we described in this article. This suite of solutions, which includes Google’s Cloud Functions, aims to accelerate application development, simplify deployment processes, scale resources and automate operational tasks.
Cloud Run is defined as a managed runtime environment for containerized applications. App Engine .js is a platform-as-a-service (Platform as a Service | PaaS) solution.
In other words, Cloud Run requires applications to run in a container, while App Engine Flex does not require container deployment. While Cloud Run is designed for both software developers and developer operations professionals (devops), App Engine focuses on developers.
Google’s serverless solutions in Global IT
Global IT has been bringing Google Cloud solutions to its customers as Google’s oldest and only Business Partner in Turkey since 2006. Google Workspace uses a family of solutions such as Google Cloud Platform, Google For Education, Google Anthos, and Google Maps Platform to grow and take their customers’ digital businesses a few steps further. It can implement all the possibilities offered by Google in the cloud in its portfolio including infrastructure and application modernization, disaster recovery, data cloud, artificial intelligence, cloud check-up, database and security solutions, especially the modernization of e-commerce.
We invite anyone who wants to grow their business digitally by discovering the advantages of serverless architecture, deploy complex application infrastructures and intensive workloads on powerful hardware running in Google’s data centers located in different parts of the world, and reach the flexibility and speed they want in their development processes to contact us by filling out the form at the bottom of this page.