Building Serverless Applications with Google Cloud Run

Foreword

I started my career as the dot-com bubble was inflating. Companies set their sights on becoming “the future of [fill in the blank]” by leveraging the internet to transform how people did everything from ordering pet food to buying books. Companies rushed to build data centers, filled them with servers, and began writing the software that would go on to eat the world, but not before the bubble burst—most companies filed for bankruptcy but left the servers and a mountain of technical debt behind.

The bursting of the dot-com bubble gave birth to a universe where every company was transformed into a tech company built on top of server farms and the weeds of infrastructure that grew around them. Soon the technical debt caught up to us and forced the industry to slow down—way down—and shift focus to keeping the lights on. Instead of building innovative applications for our customers, most of us spent our time patching servers and hiding behind firewalls, while our security teams chased vulnerabilities around.

What was supposed to propel us into the future became an anchor to the past.

While our server farms were slow to evolve, the cloud came to the rescue and offered a faster, cheaper, and better alternative. Instead of racking and stacking our own servers, we could rent theirs by the hour. While this was indeed an improvement, there was still something holding us back—servers.

Automation tools came and went, each offering a better way of managing servers but still occupying ...