Does google cloud run need load balancing?

Question

I am currently working on a deploying a front-end that will scale dynamically based on the usage on google cloud platform. I was advised by a friend to use google cloud run. I have my angular front end building to a docker image with a simple express server and deployed on google cloud run. This (from what I understand) means that when the request threshold is met on one of the docker instances, another will boot up and take on the additional requests. How does this differ from a load balancer? Do I need a load balancer on top of google cloud run scaling?

I apologize in advance for my lack of devops knowledge.

Answer 1

Cloud Run provides autoscaling, meaning that you don't necessarily need to put a Load Balancer in front of your Cloud run services (which in the case of serverless products in GCP are known as Network Endpoint Groups), as this is done automatically on your behalf: each revision is automatically scaled to the number of container instances needed to handle all incoming requests, and even cooler since it's a scale to zero service the number of instances can reach zero if you are not receiving any requests (be aware that spinning up each new instance does necessarily take some time, which is known as cold starts, so you can always set a value of min_instances to avoid this type of issues). The use of Network Endpoint Groups is more oriented if you'd only have the backend part of your application hosted in Cloud Run, need your Load Balancer to do some sort of special routing and I believe the most wide use will be if you need to have a fixed external IP address for your application.