# Google Cloud Run

38 Hacker News commenters recommended Google Cloud Run and 17 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for scale-to-zero containers that bill only while active and avoid Kubernetes management. Main caveat: cold starts can be slow and costs can climb.

## Why people recommend it

- Scales to zero when idle (4 comments): "Cloud Run makes lots of sense when running lots of small apps, apps scale to zero automatically." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47289239)) "Cloud Run doesn't bill when idle; it only bills when active." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50075389)) "Auto-scaling (0-5 instances, scales to zero when idle)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45803804))
- Easier than Kubernetes or ECS (5 comments): "Just ECS or Cloud Run have simple abstractions for horizontally scalable services and sidecars support." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350911)) "I find GCP Cloud Run soooo much more pleasant to work with than either AWS Lambda or ECS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50087456)) "it is cheap, it abstracts the nightmare of managing a Kubernetes cluster" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47918252))
- Flexible: any container, long jobs (3 comments): "Cloud Run is one service where GCP really shines. It is very flexible: handles services and long running background jobs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095872)) "serverless containers are almost always a better approach since it provides much more flexibility" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50074073)) "As long as you have a container that has an HTTP server on 0.0.0.0:8080 you're good." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46285159))
- Cheap for small production apps (3 comments): "Cloud Run has the best ergonomics/economics of all of the serverless container runtimes at the moment." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50089587)) "GCP Cloud Run + Neon for relatively cheap production hosting." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49476728)) "it's just enormous value for a small builder" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700024))

## What people warn about

- Costs can add up quickly (3 comments): "My fuckup was setting --cpu 4 --memory 16Gi during initial migration and only optimizing instance counts, not resource sizing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404127)) "If we spin up a new container every time (which we do when we were using Google Cloud Run), we had to pay API pricing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47867332)) "Wait you’re still paying $5 per day on an idle service?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46382098))
- Limits on routing and CPU options (3 comments): "It does have real tradeoffs/flaws/limitations, chief among them, Run isn't allowed to "become" Kubernetes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46764667)) "GCR doesn't let you deploy to high-CPU/MEM instances, has lower performance due to multi-tenant hosts" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46320808)) "cloud run wouldn't fit our use case because of the routing and ephemeral nature" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737658))
- Cold starts can be slow (2 comments): "Google has a similar, scale to zero container story but their cold startup time is in seconds. Too slow." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875401)) "we find it has a much better cold start compared to Cloud Run" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47871115))
- Google terms and vendor trust concerns (2 comments): "They may change their service agreements or pricing structure in hard to decipher ToS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46379443)) "being tied to an evil corporation people are trying to move past" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700754))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Amazon ECS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-ecs.md): 34 recommend
- [AWS Fargate](https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-fargate.md): 10 recommend
- [Cloudflare Containers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-containers.md): 9 recommend
- [AWS ECS Fargate](https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-ecs-fargate.md): 9 recommend
- [Azure Container Apps](https://hackerapproved.com/p/azure-container-apps.md): 6 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://cloud.google.com/run)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Google Cloud Run", https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-cloud-run/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).