GCP Serverless Compute Options Overview

Intro

This is a brief overview of the Serverless Compute Options in GCP.

After reading this post, I hope you are:

Familiar with the main options (at a high-level)
Understand some main use-cases for each option
Have a limited understanding of what it looks like to work with a service in each product

The google docs on these subjects are really helpful… I strongly recommend reading through them.

Here are the primary compute options in GCP:

Visual, Google Compute Options

For this discussion, we’ll focus on the three serverless options:

Product	Docs	Description	Cool Features	Use-Cases
Cloud Run	docs	Runs containerized apps	Split http traffic btw. diff versions of an app for A/B Tesing Uses knative, allowing portability Can be triggered by events	Websites/APIs Cronjobs
App Engine	docs	Run http services	Split http traffic btw. diff versions of an app for A/B Tesing Easy config. using `app.yaml` Flexible structure allowing services in different languages in the same app	Server-rendered websites/APIs
Cloud Functions	docs	Run event-driven functions	Uses knative, allowing portability