Cloud Run on GKE brings a managed experience for Knative/serving and Istio that aligns with Cloud Run. We install and manage the Knative version in your cluster and keep it running for you. Above what you get with base Kubernetes ability to deploy a container, Cloud Run on GKE gives you request-based auto-scaling of container instances, network programming with Istio, and Stackdriver integration for logging, monitoring, and metrics. You also get the Cloud Run UI and CLI to deploy, manage, and update your services.

One of our core goals with Cloud Run is to enable serverless portability; not just for workloads, but tooling and developer experiences. By offering Cloud Run in both a hosted and Kubernetes platform, both enabled by Knative, you can leverage compatible serverless tooling and knowledge across the range of platforms from hosted to GKE to k8s anywhere.

This post [1] explains it a lot better. Quoted from the doc. ( Why they didn't include it in the page is beyond me )

"Cloud Run is a managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. Cloud Run is serverless: it abstracts away all infrastructure management, so you can focus on what matters most — building great applications. It is built from Knative, letting you choose to run your containers either fully managed with Cloud Run, or in your Google Kubernetes Engine cluster with Cloud Run on GKE.". So, like lambda but with containers. Pretty much what I have wanted since I first started learning about Docker.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19611194

``` # deploy to the fully managed product gcloud beta run deploy --image gcr.io/foo/bar --region us-central1

# deploy to a GKE cluster gcloud beta run deploy --image gcr.io/foo/bar --cluster myCluster --cluster_location us-central1-a ```

Cloud Run on GKE specifically adds the Knative CRDs (e.g. Knative Serving) to your GKE cluster, giving you additional autoscaling and different rollout primitives.