GCP and Services

These nine areas to further help you choose which GCP service you should use:

1. Deployment Type

The delivery method to deploy the stateless application

1. Scaling

Identify if scaling is possible and if it is, what method of scaling is enabled. Cloud Run for Anthos scales differently from a standard app.

3 Runtime environment support

Language support varies between services in GCP. Cloud Run and Cloud Run/Anthos flavors support virtually all common languages, but App Engine and Cloud Functions support more limited language support.

4 Access controls

There are different approaches to handling security and identity management for stateless applications in GCP and they each handle things a little differently.

5 HTTP/gRPC

Only Cloud Run with Anthos handles Cloud Endpoints management due to the mixed topology requirements

6 Custom domains

Standalone and container-based applications support custom domain name mapping to your app, but the Cloud Functions platform does not.

7 GPU/TPU support

Extended GPU capability using either graphics processing units (GPUs) or tensor processing units (TPUs) is only supported with Cloud Run for Anthos.

8 Timeout (minutes)

The number of minutes before timeout with no activity is different between stateless deployment types. Cloud Run flavors both offer 15-minute timeout windows; Cloud Functions times out at 9 minutes, and App Engine at 1 minute.

9 VPC Networking

All stateless applications except for Cloud Run allow for VPC networking. As of this writing, GCP does not have VPC networking in general availability.