Works with docker containers so you can run the same simple stack locally as in prod. No need for more exotic serverless architectures.
Generous free tier, too!
Have only good things to say about it for quickly firing up a product.
> Or just app engine honestly.
As a former App Engine PM and PM of Cloud Run, this warms my heart to hear--I'm glad folks love to use it :)
It's been a few years since I've worked on these products, but they were designed to be composed and used by each other. Cloud Run provides an autoscaling container runtime with Knative compatible API; Cloud Build (and Container Registry) + Cloud Run = App Engine, App Engine + CloudEvents = Cloud Functions.
With a Knative compatible API, you can theoretically take those primitives and move them to your own K8s cluster, managed (GKE/EKS/AKS) or self-managed, giving folks a tremendous amount of flexibility down the line if/when they need it (hint: the majority of customers didn't, and the fully managed services were great).
I had the idea that cloud run was like a (possibly auto-scaling?) abstraction of a container runtime or something so it makes sense that app engine uses it.
I don't think I have been aware of that fact though when using app engine in the past -- which is good, by the way, I don't want to know or care about this, just run my containers somehow :-)