Hacker News Reader

Comment by thesandlord | Hacker News Reader

Give Google Cloud Run a try. Can run any Docker container, and billing is per request. It is basically a fully managed knative.

https://cloud.google.com/run

My side projects all run for free.

(I work for Google Cloud)

View on HN

That.. is really impressive! Had no idea about this, thanks!

For a well rounded review, can you or anyone comment on similar offerings with competitors? I was not familiar with per-request containers, but it sounds like exactly what I wanted.

Thoughts?

I've been trying every Docker platform for years (Joyrnt Triton, Tutum, k8s on various platforms)... Cloud Run is by far my favorite

I fully agree with this. I'm using Cloud Run since the day it got into beta and never been happier. It beats all the other platforms (for docker) IMO.

Out of curiosity, what are you using for your databases?

Not OP but I can setup DB of choice on an instance or group of instances and access directly from the Cloud Run containers. Our particular main stack is on MongoDB 3.4 so we deployed Atlas on the VPC and the containers access it just fine.

For side projects doesn't it end up being a little too expensive?

I use Cloud Firestore, it's also serverless and is really easy to use for building SPAs as you can do a lot of things with just frontend code and trigger cloud functions when things in the database change.

I do wish there was a serverless SQL option like AWS has, but nothing yet. Can always use Cloud SQL, but as others have mentioned you need to access it over a public IP (for now)

Have you seen the instructions for using a Unix socket with Cloud SQL from Cloud Run?

https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/connect-run

As far as I am aware, there is nothing like CloudRun where your whole App are changed at a per second / request intervals. ( Although No Private Network means Your SQL requires Public IP which is a big No No )

I haven't tried using it though, and my recent submission [1] where BaseCamp had problem with GCP and moved back to AWS.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21733996

Although a public IP address is required, you don't need to poke any holes in the firewall. As a result, it is not a problem from a security perspective.

https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/connect-run

Cloud run looks cool, but doesn't seem to support databases ? Unless it supports linked containers?

I like that it's a mix of AWS lambda scaling with more open environments... Though it's hard to read through the marketing... "Nearly instance availing from 1 to 1000"

Cloud Run user here. It does not support running a database as a Cloud Run service; you'd need to connect to a Cloud SQL instance. This is one area I really hope PaaS providers improve on in the future. The closest thing at the moment is Aurora Serverless on AWS, especially with their neat HTTP connection system. That being said, cold starts are even worse since they're now the start up time for your application in addition to the start up time for Aurora Serverless.

But, correct me if this has changed please, last i checked Cloud Run did not support private networks. So you SQL instance has to be exposed to the internet, correct?

Yes, Cloud Run requires your Cloud SQL instance to have a public IP address.

Your Cloud SQL instance would have a public IP, but would not be exposed to the internet. All traffic is blocked by default. Only GCP service accounts with the right permissions can make connections to your SQL instance, or IPs added to a whitelist (not recommended).

Ah, thanks for clearing that up, I was unaware. How is the traffic blocked by default? Firewall layer?

Yes. There is a proxy in front of the database which only allows whitelisted traffic (dangerous) or traffic with a valid cert (safe).

You might want to check out FaunaDB.

Unfortunately FaunaDB isn't a SQL database, so it's in the same class as things like Cloud Firestore, AWS DynamoDB, and Mongo Atlas. Good datastores for serverless applications, but not so great for traditional applications migrated to serverless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com