How Google’s Cloud Run runs just about any app, anywhere, in the cloud

Google Cloud Platform, offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube.

They recently announced a number of new products and improvements to customers using the service.

Firstly, they announced a new serverless compute platform for containerised apps with portability built-in:

• Cloud Run, which is a fully managed serverless execution environment

• Cloud Run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which brings a serverless developer experience and workload portability to the GKE cluster

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• And Knative, the open API and runtime environment bringing the serverless developer experience and workload portability to one’s existing Kubernetes cluster anywhere

The company has also been making new investments in its Cloud Functions and App Engine platforms:

• New second-generation runtimes

• New open-sourced Functions Framework

• Additional core capabilities, including connectivity to private GCP resources

Whether it’s to increase developer velocity, or to lower the operational overhead of managing infrastructure, using serverless compute can help developers focus on writing code that delivers business value.

At Cloud Next, Google took its commitment to open source to the next level by announcing strategic partnerships with leading open source-centric companies in the areas of data management and analytics, including: Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs.

At Cloud Next 2019, Google also announced Anthos, Google Cloud’s new open platform that lets you run an app anywhere, simply, flexibly and securely. Using open standards, Anthos lets one run applications, unmodified, on existing on-prem hardware investments or in the public cloud, based on the Cloud Services Platform Google announced last year.

You can gather more detail about some of Google’s new product offerings below:

Cloud Run

Traditional serverless offerings come with challenges such as constrained runtime support and vendor lock-in. Developers are often faced with a hard decision: choose between the ease and velocity that comes with serverless or the flexibility and portability that comes with containers. Google Cloud offers the best of both worlds.

Cloud Run lets you run stateless HTTP-driven containers, without worrying about the infrastructure. Cloud Run is a fully serverless offering: It takes care of all infrastructure management including provisioning, configuring, scaling, and managing servers. It automatically scales up or down within seconds, even down to zero depending on traffic, ensuring you pay only for the resources you actually use.

Cloud Run is also available on GKE, meaning you can run serverless workloads on your existing GKE clusters. You can deploy the same stateless HTTP services to your own GKE cluster and simultaneously abstract away complex Kubernetes concepts.

Using Cloud Run on GKE also gives you access to custom machine types, Compute Engine networks, and the ability to run side by side with other workloads deployed in the same cluster. It provides both the simplicity of deployment of Cloud Run and the flexibility of GKE. Customers such as Airbus Aerial are already using Cloud Run on GKE to process and stream aerial images.

Cloud Run is based on Knative, an open API and runtime environment that lets you run your serverless workloads anywhere you choose, fully managed on Google Cloud Platform, on your GKE cluster, or on your own self-managed Kubernetes cluster. Thanks to Knative, it’s easy to start with Cloud Run and move to Cloud Run on GKE later on. Or you can use Knative in your own Kubernetes cluster and migrate to Cloud Run in the future. By using Knative as the underlying platform, you can move your workloads across platforms substantially reducing switching costs.

For developers looking to quickly and easily connect cloud services, Google now offers Google Cloud Functions, an event-driven serverless compute platform that lets you write code that responds to events, without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Cloud Functions makes it simple and easy to connect to cloud services such as BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Firebase, and many more.

A number of new and frequently requested features have been added to help you adopt functions easily and seamlessly within your current environment:

• New language runtimes support such as Node.js 8, Python 3.7, and Go 1.11 in general availability, Node.js 10 in beta; Java 8 and Go 1.12 in alpha.
• The new open-source Functions Framework, available for Node.js 10, will help you take the first step towards making your functions portable. You can now write a function, run it locally and build a container image to run it in any container-based environment.
• Serverless VPC Access, which creates a VPC connector that lets your function talk to your existing GCP resources that are protected by network boundaries, without exposing the resources to the internet. This feature allows your function to use Cloud Memorystore as well as hundreds of third-party services deployed from the GCP Marketplace. It is available in beta.
• Per-function identity provides security access at the most granular function level and is now generally available.
• Scaling controls, now available in beta, help prevent your auto-scaling functions from overwhelming backends that do not scale up as quickly in a serverless fashion.

Functions provide agility and simplicity to make your developers more productive. But not all applications need to be broken down into granular functions. Sometimes you want to deploy large applications, while still leveraging the benefits of serverless.

Since its inception, App Engine, a serverless application platform for deploying highly scalable web and mobile apps, has evolved to meet developers where they are, whether it’s adding capabilities or support for new runtimes.

Google has now announced support for new second-generation runtimes: Node.js 10, Go 1.11, and PHP 7.2 in general availability and Ruby 2.5 and Java 11 in alpha. These runtimes provide an idiomatic developer experience, faster deployments, remove previous API restrictions and come with support for native modules. Serverless VPC access also lets you connect to your existing GCP resources from your App Engine apps in a more secure manner without exposing them to the internet.

Paired with Google Cloud’s flexible and open serverless compute offerings, these services make it easy to build comprehensive, full-stack solutions that don’t compromise on scale or performance.

To learn more about Google Cloud’s serverless offerings, click here.

Introducing Anthos: An entirely new platform for managing applications in today’s multi-cloud world

Google is now making Anthos’ hybrid functionality generally available both on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and in your data centre with GKE On-Prem. Anthos will also let you manage workloads running on third-party clouds like AWS and Azure, giving you the freedom to deploy, run and manage your applications on the cloud of your choice, without requiring administrators and developers to learn different environments and APIs.

Anthos Migrate is also now in beta, and auto-migrates VMs from on-premises, or other clouds, directly into containers in GKE with minimal effort. This unique migration technology lets you migrate and modernise your infrastructure in one streamlined motion, without upfront modifications to the original VMs or applications. Through this transformation, your IT team is free from managing infrastructure tasks like VM maintenance and OS patching, so it can focus on managing and developing applications. Migrating also lets you take advantage of other integrations within Anthos.

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