How is Google's Cloud Run different from a traditional Kubernetes cluster?

Question

I was thinking of testing out Google's Cloud Run for a simple app when all of a sudden I got thinking as to whether Cloud Run is basically a managed K8s cluster. I really wanted to know as to when using Cloud Run would be preferred over traditional K8s clusters and why we should prefer it?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Technology wise, cloud Run is a managed Kubernetes cluster with Knative to run the containers on top of it.

However Cloud Run brings an additional advantages when you run fully managed: you only pay for used resources. In other words, Cloud Run can do scale down to zero cost, rather than bottoming out at the cost of keeping a minimum sized cluster running.