I'm not sure google cloud run can be considered a fair comparison to Kubernetes. It would be like saying AWS Lambda is a lot easier to use than EC2. I've used both Kubernetes and GCR at the current company I cofounded, and theres pros and cons to both. (Team of about 10 engineers)

GCR was simple to run simple workloads, but, an out of the box Postgres database can't just handle unlimited connections and so connecting to it from GCR without having a DB connection proxy like PG bouncer risks exhausting the connection pool. For a traditional web app at any moderate scale, you typically need some fine grained control over per process, per server and per DB connection pools, which you'd lose with GCR.

Also, to take advantage of GCR's fine grained CPU pricing, you'd have to have an app that boots extremely quickly, so it can be turned off during periods of inactivity, and rescheduled when a request comes in.

Most of our heaviest workloads run on Kubernetes for those reasons.

The other thing thats changed since this author probably explored Kubernetes is that there are a ton of providers now that offer a Kubernetes control plane for no cost. The ones that I know of are Digital Ocean and Linode, where the pricing for a Kubernetes cluster is the same as their droplet pricing for the same resources. That didn't use to be the case. [1] The cheapest you can get is a $12 / month, fully featured cluster on Linode.

I've been building, in my spare time, a platform that tries to make Kubernetes more usable for single developers: https://canine.sh, based on my learnings that the good parts of Kubernetes are actually quite simple to use and manage.

[1] Digital oceans pricing page references its free control plane offering https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing

> an out of the box Postgres database can't just handle unlimited connections and so connecting to it from GCR without having a DB connection proxy like PG bouncer risks exhausting the connection pool.

Good point. How many connections can it handle? Seems like it's up to 262142 in theory? Or am I reading this wrong: https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/flags#postgres-m ??

But even 1000 seems ok? 1 per container, so 1000 running containers? Quite a lot in my world, especially since they can be quite beefy. Would be very worried about the cost way before 1000 simultaneously running containers :)

Why are GCR and pgbouncer incompatible? Could you run a pgbouncer instance in GCR?