A stateless containerized API has spiky traffic, and the team wants no cluster to manage. What fits best?
Why A is the answer
Cloud Run
Cloud Run scales containers automatically, including to zero, with no cluster to operate.
In detail
- Cloud Run suits stateless containers with spiky traffic, with no cluster.
- Keep the service stateless, because instances come and go.
Use case
An illustrative scenario, not a real incident.
A ticketing API is quiet for days, then floods during a sale. Cloud Run adds instances for the rush and drops to zero after it.
See it in different ways
flowchart TD
A{"Workload"} -->|"Short event handler"| B["Cloud Run functions"]
A -->|"Stateless container"| C["Cloud Run"]
A -->|"Complex container platform"| D["GKE"]
A -->|"Full VM control"| E["Compute Engine"]mindmap
root((Compute))
Cloud Run
Stateless containers
GKE
Kubernetes control
Compute Engine
Custom machine types
Spot VMs
VMware Engine
Existing VMwareflowchart TD
Q{"Which do you need?"}
Q -->|"No cluster"| A0["Cloud Run"]
Q -->|"Kubernetes control"| A1["Google Kubernetes Engine"]Key point: Cloud Run scales containers with no cluster.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. GKE Standard
- GKE Standard is a cluster to manage.
- C. A managed instance group
- That is more to manage.
- D. A single Compute Engine VM
- One VM cannot handle spikes.