As we reflect on the past year, Heraclitus’ phrase “The only constant in life is change” has never rang more true. With the pandemic, companies had to shift operations, launch new products and adapt to extreme demand patterns, sometimes within a matter of weeks.

To respond to customer needs faster and more efficiently, many companies turned to serverless technology, designing applications with real-time signals and intelligence built in. From apps and sites for healthcare appointments and vaccinations, public-sector employment benefits, contact tracing, retail logistics, curbside delivery, hotel and travel booking—you name it, companies built it with serverless.

Redefining serverless

The world changed, the market changed, our lives changed and we here at Google Cloud also changed, introducing new products to meet our customers’ needs and grow with them.

Serverless technology, in particular, has changed a lot since it was first introduced. Google first launched serverless compute in 2008 with the launch of  App Engine, helping customers scale their applications faster and seamlessly. We then added the ability to run Functions as a Service with  Cloud Functions, giving customers a simple developer experience with integrated telemetry and observability. In parallel, we also introduced innovations to the container market with Kubernetes. Pretty soon, customers started asking us if we could combine the awesome serverless attributes of auto-scaling and developer experience with the flexibility of containers.

Enter  Cloud Run, the next generation of serverless. Serverless is now no longer just about event-driven programming or microservices. It’s also about running complex workloads at scale while still preserving a delightful developer experience. In fact, serverless with Cloud Run is about having a true developer platform with the flexibility to run any language, any library, any binary.

There are three capabilities that make Cloud Run the next-generation of serverless, and not the same ‘serverless’ you find elsewhere:

• A great developer-centric experience
• Versatility: expanding to a broader set of containerized apps
• Built-in DevOps and security

Let’s take a look at the attributes in greater depth.

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