Google Cloud Run vs Sliplane: A Comparison of Containerized Application Deployment and Management
Ease of Use
| Sliplane | GCR |
|---|---|
| 4/5 | 3/5 |
Reliability
| Sliplane | GCR |
|---|---|
| 4/5 | 5/5 |
Scalability
| Sliplane | GCR |
|---|---|
| 3/5 | 5/5 |
Pricing
| Sliplane | GCR |
|---|---|
| 4/5 | 2/5 |
Scalability on Google Cloud Run
Google Cloud Run is a serverless compute engine. This means the cloud provider takes full control of allocating compute resources for your software based on demand. Google Cloud’s serverless architecture allows it to quickly scale up automatically as needed and scale down to 0. Services that have been idle for a while will experience cold starts, meaning their response time becomes significantly higher on the first invocation. There are general development tips to reduce the impact of cold starts on Google Cloud Run.
Scalability on Sliplane
Sliplane services do not run in a serverless environment. You get access to servers that stay up and running until they get deleted again, therefore, startup times are not an issue and in general fluctuating response times are less likely to happen. On the flip side, general scalability is more limited and you might have to overprovision servers if you are dealing with inconsistent traffic.
Reliability
GCR Reliability
GCR provides an SLA. With the exception of deployments to Mexico, Cloud Run starts refunding you 10% if monthly uptime is below 99.95% (~20 minutes of downtime) and up to 50% if it goes below 95.0% (~1.5 days of downtime). Additionally, GCR provides advanced tooling for creating high-availability setups with redundancy across all components of the system.
Sliplane Reliability
Sliplane does not provide SLAs. It is built mostly on top of Hetzner infrastructure. In the past three months (Nov 24 – Jan 24), uptime was over 99.95%, and going back further, it was consistently over 99.99%. It’s safe to say that the general reliability of the service is rock-solid, although Sliplane does not offer tooling for high-availability setups >99.99%.
Pricing
GCR Pricing
GCR prices in useast1 (South Carolina) per month based on 30.42 days of runtime including free tier, prices from 03/02/2024
Storage and Network:
In useast1 (South Carolina), Google’s Cloud storage pricing starts at $0.02 per GB and gets cheaper at higher volume.
Bandwidth charges are split into two tiers: standard and premium. The premium tier is more expensive, but offers lower latency, better uptime, and comes with some free usage. We will look at the standard tier. Incoming traffic is free, outgoing traffic depends on where it’s routed to. In the US, traffic to servers outside the Google network is charged $0.085 per GB ($85 per TB) and prices decrease with higher usage.
Pricing of Sliplane
Compared to GCR, Sliplane’s pricing is simpler. You pay per server, which includes storage and traffic up to a certain limit. Beyond that, there are additional costs for extra bandwidth.
Summary
In summary, GCR and Sliplane are suited for different users and needs.
GCR is ideal for enterprises with high scalability requirements and no tight restrictions on budget. It’s also suitable for companies with spiky or highly fluctuating workloads. On the other hand, Sliplane is perfect for startups, SMBs, and solo developers who are looking for a simple and affordable solution to deploy containerized workloads.
