What is the difference between Cloud Run and GKE?
Answer
Both run containerized workloads but with different abstraction levels. Cloud Run: fully managed, serverless. You deploy a container image; Google manages everything — servers, networking, scaling, load balancing. Scales to zero. Best for stateless HTTP services, APIs, and event-driven workloads with variable or unpredictable traffic. Pay per request. No operational overhead but limited control. GKE: managed Kubernetes. You manage (or let Autopilot manage) the node pool. Full Kubernetes ecosystem: StatefulSets, DaemonSets, custom operators, CRDs. Best for complex microservices, stateful applications, batch workloads, and when you need fine-grained control or specific Kubernetes features. GKE Autopilot bridges the gap — fully managed nodes like Cloud Run but with the full Kubernetes API. For new containerized services, start with Cloud Run and migrate to GKE only if you hit Cloud Run's limitations.