[kelseyhightower]

Thanks for your comment. This is something the team keeps top of mind and influences our decisions and road maps. Please continue to keep us honest here. I'll get others to weight in on this, but here's my personal opinion on the matter.

AppEngine has been around for a long time, 12 years to be exact, and in my mind it's a completely different product, and still one of our most successful. While Cloud Run competes with AppEngine on some fronts, customers really appreciate AppEngine's deep integration with other GCP managed services. It's a full blown PaaS.

I expect Cloud Run to improve over time and gain more features that will no doubt match the requirements of many AppEngine customers, some may switch to Cloud Run, but we are not forcing them to.

Cloud Functions already shares a lot of underlying infrastructure with Cloud Run, which shares a lot of underlying infrastructure with AppEngine, and that's by design. These days I like to think of Cloud Functions as a simplified developer experience on top of Cloud Run focused on task orientated workloads backed by events and triggers.

Can we continue to support 3 somewhat overlapping Serverless platforms going forward? I believe the answer is yes, thanks to the shared infrastructure, and the fact we truly believe all three platforms offer a unique set of developer experiences worth preserving. Maybe there is future state where one product satisfies all use cases, but that's not today, so we plan to keep listening to customers, and invest across the board.

One recent example of investing across the board: you can now leverage global load balancing[1] across all three Serverless platforms.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/negs/serverless...

[spyspy]

Hi Kelsey! Appreciate your take here. You obviously have deeper insight than I do. Honestly I'm in favor of the path I described. Engineers I work with spend too much time already arguing the best platform for any given service, especially when the pros and cons are very, very similar. That being said, with the recent features released for Run (load-balancing, min instances, streaming gRPC) we're basically 100% bought in to that direction. I can't think of any feature AppEngine or Functions have (esp AppEngine) that would pull me back.

Though I will say I dearly miss the days of first generation GAE standard, when things like memcache, taskqeue, datastore, auth and logging were all baked in as first-class citizens and Just Worked™.

[kelseyhightower]

Cloud run is attempting to enable that "Just Works" experience, but we are trying to do it by leveraging the best of open source, and native client libraries. Feels like we are getting close and I'll be sure to share this feedback with the rest of the team.