Google Cloud Run vs. Google Kubernetes Engine

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google Cloud Run
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Google Cloud Run enables users to build and deploy scalable containerized apps written in any language (including Go, Python, Java, Node.js, .NET, and Ruby) on a fully managed platform. Cloud Run can be paired with other container ecosystem tools, including Google's Cloud Build, Cloud Code, Artifact Registry, and Docker. And it features out-of-the-box integration with Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace, and Error Reporting to ensure the health of an application.N/A
Google Kubernetes Engine
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Google Kubernetes Engine supplies containerized application management powered by Kubernetes which includes Google Cloud services including load balancing, automatic scaling and upgrade, and other Google Cloud services.
$0
GKE Autopilot Ephemeral Storage Price GB-hr
Pricing
Google Cloud RunGoogle Kubernetes Engine
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Autopilot Mode - 3 year commitment price (USD)
$0
GKE Autopilot Ephemeral Storage Price GB-hr
Autopilot Mode - 1 year commitment price (USD)
$0.0000438
GKE Autopilot Ephemeral Storage Price GB-hr
Autopilot Mode - Regular Price
$0.0000548
GKE Autopilot Ephemeral Storage Price GB-hr
Autopilot Mode - Spot Price
$0.0000548
GKE Autopilot Ephemeral Storage Price GB-hr
Autopilot Mode - Spot Price
$0.0014767
GKE Autopilot Pod Memory Price GB-hr
Autopilot Mode - 3 year commitment price (USD)
$0
GKE Autopilot Pod Memory Price GB-hr
Autopilot Mode - 1 year commitment price (USD)
$0.0039380
GKE Autopilot Pod Memory Price GB-hr
Autopilot Mode - Regular Price
$0.0049225
GKE Autopilot Price GB-hr
Autopilot Mode - Spot Price
$0.0133
GKE Autopilot vCPU Price vCPU-hr
Autopilot Mode - 3 year commitment price (USD)
$0.02
GKE Autopilot vCPU Price vCPU-hr
Autopilot Mode - 1 year commitment price (USD)
$0.0356000
GKE Autopilot vCPU Price vCPU-hr
Autopilot Mode - Regular Price
$0.0445
vCPU Price vCPU-hr
Standard Mode
$0.10
per hour
Cluster Management
$0.10
per cluster per hour
Cluster Management
$74.40 monthly credit
per month per hour
Standard Mode - Free Version
Free
per hour
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Cloud RunGoogle Kubernetes Engine
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google Cloud RunGoogle Kubernetes Engine
Considered Both Products
Google Cloud Run
Chose Google Cloud Run
Most of our existing serverless services are deployed on Google to it was a natural choice. With the new artifact registry, its very easy to deploy. With git flows, its now even easier to update the deployment just with a commit to the main branch. The initial trial period is …
Chose Google Cloud Run
The other two obvious cloud providers have direct alternatives: AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. Both were also evaluated briefly (only to validate that they exist); however, the organization had settled on shifting to Google for business reasons, and therefore, the comparison …
Chose Google Cloud Run
Google Cloud Run is integrated into GCP resources, admin, and billing. But it is not as easy to use as some other platforms like Heroku.
Chose Google Cloud Run
Flexibility of features snd customzing options tha optimized the large process and make it on the the go to reuse the same process in multiple deployments ot rollouts
Chose Google Cloud Run
Cloud Run is just so much easier and straightforward to work with than EC2 when it comes to getting a Docker image up and running and serving requests.
Chose Google Cloud Run
Clear separation between container and execution layer.
Chose Google Cloud Run
Usage is easy and also we have GCP as out cloud partner hence we made up our mind to go with Cloud Run and so far no issues things are going fine with it. and getting good features from Google in it.
Chose Google Cloud Run
DigitalOcean auto scale droplets is still in early stages and is not on par with Google Cloud Run.

It is easy to develop and test Google Cloud Run applications compared to other available alternatives.
Chose Google Cloud Run
For us, Google Cloud Run is a complement to Google Tag Manager to enable server-side data collection.
Chose Google Cloud Run
AWS Lambda supports code zip package, enabling lower cold start time. Also, AWS Lambda pricing is much simpler, easier to understand.

Chose Google Cloud Run
The Goolge docs for their products as well as the UI is a lot nicer than AWS or Azure and in general I found it much easy to work with. We selected Google mainly because of startup credits and the support offered but can confidently say we would choose them again without that …
Google Kubernetes Engine
Chose Google Kubernetes Engine
We have a CICD pipeline, which we wrote using the Gitlab CI file. This is connected directly to our GKE cluster. So, any change in our code will directly start the CICD pipeline. The pipeline first tests the deployment on testing environments. We are also using Helm charts to …
Chose Google Kubernetes Engine
We had to move several products to Google Cloud, and the Google Kubernetes Engine was the option recommended to us, so we investigated it and ran with it. Back then (2019), we were not aware of Cloud Run-provisioned K8s clusters, so our other option was a completely …
Chose Google Kubernetes Engine
GKE spins up new nodes a LOT faster than AKS. GKE's auto scaler runs a lot smoother than AKS. GKE has a lot more Kubernetes features baked in natively.
Chose Google Kubernetes Engine
In comparison to functionality with EKS and AKS, it has a better upgrade path and the price is lower. Not sure why flannel is the primary overlay network provider but network policies are supported as well.
Chose Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine has better upgrades and auto-scale management. Google Kubernetes Engine is also the cheapest option for managed Kubernetes, and Google is the principal contributor to the Kubernetes project.
Chose Google Kubernetes Engine
Our organization went with Google's Kubernetes Engine because we are already significantly invested in the Google Cloud Platform. In our evaluation of Amazon's Elastic Kubernetes Service we were turned off by recent concerns about Amazon becoming overly dominant in the cloud …
Features
Google Cloud RunGoogle Kubernetes Engine
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
Google Cloud Run
7.3
Ratings
6% below category average
Google Kubernetes Engine
8.6
Ratings
11% above category average
Security and Isolation8.60 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Container Orchestration8.40 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Cluster Management6.40 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Storage Management2.70 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization8.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Discovery Tools7.60 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks8.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery8.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging7.50 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Google Cloud RunGoogle Kubernetes Engine
Small Businesses
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.6 out of 10
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Google Cloud RunGoogle Kubernetes Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.4
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google Cloud RunGoogle Kubernetes Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
Microservices and RestFul API application as it is fast and reliant. Seamless integration with event triggers such as pubsub or event arc, so you can easily integrate that with usecases with file uploads, database changes, etc. Basically great with short-lived tasks, if however, you have long-running processses, Cloud Run might not be idle for this. For example if you have a long running data processing task, other solutions such as kubeflow pipelines or dataflow are more suited for this kind of tasks. Cloud Run is also stateless, so if you need memory, you will have to connect an external database.
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Google Kubernetes Engine is well suited for dynamic and large workloads since it can scale up with usage. It is easily configurable, which allows for flexibility. User interface is simple to navigate, which reduces roadblocks for a team with people unfamiliar with Kubernetes. Great if you are already using other GCP services as it integrates well with that.
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Pros
  • Real-time autoscaling. Escalamento automático em tempo real
  • Simplified Continuous Deployment. Implantação contínua simplificada
  • Running tasks in the background. Execução de tarefas em segundo plano
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  • Deployment of a new GKE cluster is really fast in comparison to other cloud providers.
  • GCP is ahead other vendors and always provide the most up to date Kubernetes version.
  • GKE automation for master upgrade and the worker nodes pool works really well.
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Cons
  • Cloud Run doesn't allow you to redeploy an already existing revision which can be inconvenient in some use cases
  • Tricky to get the deployment working to start but once it's working that's great
  • The actual deployment is not the fastest but it's not too bad
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  • Not as intuitive as it could be
  • Documentation could be better, especially for people using other Google Cloud tools
  • Not the preferred Kubernetes Engine for many apps
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Likelihood to Renew
We definitely need to renew it because we dont own our own infrastructure and storage and we are happy with Cloud Run features
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No answers on this topic
Usability
The UI/console is great... the documentation is top-notch for developers, but the CLI itself when you have to script around it is very complex and easy to forget some options... the downside of a generic command line client.
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It's a great product if you learn it. It has flexibility and is very strong. Autoscaling and Resource management make running huge applications a breeze. Using Helm with Kubernetes and Terraform for infrastructure creation can totally automate your CICD pipeline. You also get easy access to CUDA cores for machine learning.
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Reliability and Availability
Not seen any major issues when we run applications its good
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No answers on this topic
Performance
Initially we felt slow but slowly it picked up and easy to manage
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Google support is excellent and helpful, but the first answer is always so bureaucratic no matter how many logs, evidence, and information you sent.
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Implementation Rating
I was involved in the initial implementation setup, Its easy with the given documentaiton we can do ourself. Not that critical
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
AWS Lambda supports code zip package, enabling lower cold start time. Also, AWS Lambda pricing is much simpler, easier to understand.
Other than that, the 2 products are very similar, including the Docker image support: the image must be built based on proprietary base image.
Obviously, if your other services are running in GCP, then Google Cloud Run is your only choice for tight integration, & private networking.
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We had to move several products to Google Cloud, and the Google Kubernetes Engine was the option recommended to us, so we investigated it and ran with it. Back then (2019), we were not aware of Cloud Run-provisioned K8s clusters, so our other option was a completely self-managed K8s cluster on Compute Engine VMs, which we did not have the knowledge of and capacity to handle.
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Scalability
It has good auto scale feature and reliable also
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • It has saved us some costs since we now do not require a live server and have moved to a serverless workflow for these services
  • Breaking changes do not affect the entire application now that we have separated our concerns using a serverless service
  • Much easier to debug since we can now isolate our services and reduce the search space for finding/fixing bugs
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  • Compared to other big K8s providers it has the best price/performance factors.
  • Upgrade process from stable to regular versions
  • Old stable releases: 1.15/1.16 should be in a stable branch.
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ScreenShots