How to use Google Cloud Run for containerized apps

Short answer

Build a container image, push it to Artifact Registry, and deploy it to Cloud Run. The platform automatically scales to zero when idle and handles HTTPS, load balancing, and request routing without cluster management.

Details

Cloud Run is built on Knative and abstracts away Kubernetes while still supporting standard containers. It scales horizontally based on concurrent requests per container instance. You can set minimum and maximum instances, request timeouts, and CPU allocation. Cloud Run services expose HTTPS endpoints automatically, and Cloud Run Jobs support background tasks.

Because Cloud Run accepts any container, it is highly portable. For building optimized images, see How to optimize Docker image size. If you need to connect services securely, how-to-connect-containers-with-user-defined-networks concepts translate to VPC connectors in GCP.

Tips

• Keep container startup time low; slow starts affect cold start latency.
• Use Cloud Run's traffic splitting for blue-green and canary-style rollouts.
• For cost optimization strategies across clouds, see how to design for cloud cost optimization.