Cloud Run's Overlooked Drawbacks | Generated by AI
Here are some unpopular or contrarian opinions / hot takes / lesser-acknowledged criticisms about Google Cloud Run that appear repeatedly in developer discussions (especially on Reddit, Hacker News, blogs, and forums). These views go against the mainstream praise of Cloud Run as “the best serverless container platform”.
Question: What are unpopular ideas about Cloud Run in Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?
Answer:
Cloud Run receives widespread praise for its simplicity, container-based serverless model, pay-per-request pricing, and excellent developer experience. However, several less popular or “unpopular opinion”-style criticisms surface consistently among users who have run production workloads for extended periods:
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Cloud Run is actually broken by design for certain networking / enterprise use cases
Its reliance on Google’s serverless VPC Access and load balancer introduces quirks (URL mangling, restrictive outbound networking, limited custom domain behavior marked “not recommended” in docs, slow / unreliable cold starts in some regions when scaling from zero). Some developers argue these aren’t small bugs but fundamental architectural trade-offs that make it unsuitable as a full replacement for GKE or Compute Engine in non-trivial apps. -
It’s not always cheaper than people claim once you need reliability
To avoid painful cold-start latency or dropped requests, many teams set min-instances = 1 (or higher) + always-allocated CPU → this turns the “pay only when processing” promise into a bill that’s closer to a cheap always-on VM. For medium-traffic services, the effective cost can exceed a small GKE Autopilot cluster or even a well-tuned Cloud Functions setup. -
Cloud Run is overrated compared to Cloud Functions for many workloads
A vocal minority (including some Google-authored contrarian articles) argues that the “Cloud Run is strictly superior” narrative is marketing-driven. For simple event-driven or HTTP-triggered logic, Cloud Functions (or the newer Cloud Run Functions) remains faster to develop, cheaper at very low traffic, has better native trigger ecosystem, and avoids container-build complexity. The “use Cloud Run for everything” advice leads teams to over-engineer simple jobs. -
Cold-start-from-zero reliability is still not great in 2025
Despite improvements, many teams report sporadic long tail latencies (several seconds) or even failed-to-wake-up events when min-instances = 0 — especially outside popular regions or with larger container images. This makes it risky for latency-sensitive user-facing APIs without min instances (→ higher cost). -
The egress / networking / VPC story remains painful compared to AWS ECS Fargate or Azure Container Apps
Serverless VPC Access connector limitations, higher latency for private services, lack of native outbound static IPs in many scenarios, and occasional weird load-balancer behaviors lead some multi-cloud or enterprise teams to view Cloud Run as “the nicest serverless container option… that still forces you to live inside Google’s networking castle”. -
It’s too easy to create lock-in disguised as simplicity
While containers are portable in theory, the tight integration with Cloud Logging, Cloud SQL proxy sidecars, IAM, Artifact Registry, domain mapping quirks, and eventing via Eventarc creates subtle lock-in. Some argue migrating away from Cloud Run later is surprisingly annoying compared to starting on plain Kubernetes or VMs.
These opinions are minority views — most developers still rate Cloud Run very highly for the 70–80% of workloads that fit its sweet spot (HTTP APIs, background workers, small-to-medium microservices). The criticisms become louder among teams running higher scale, lower latency requirements, complex networking, or very bursty / very quiet traffic patterns.
References:
- Cloud Run: broken by design (Reddit thread)
- No, Cloud Run is not better than Google Cloud Functions (Medium article)
- Shouldn’t cloud run instance reliably scale from zero instances? (Reddit)
- Coming from Azure, Cloud Run is amazing — but mentions URL mangling bug (Reddit)
- Various Hacker News and Reddit threads discussing min-instances costs and cold-start behavior (2023–2025)