How to mount persistent storage to Google Cloud Run?

Question

I was trying to run a Docker image with Cloud run and realised that there is no option for adding a persistent storage. I found a list of services in https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/using-gcp-services#connecting_to_services_in_code but all of them are access from code. I was looking to share volume with persistent storage. Is there a way around it ? Is it because persistent storage might not work shared between multiple instances at the same time ? Is there are alternative solution ?

Answer 1

Cloud Run is serverless: it abstracts away all infrastructure management.

Also is a managed compute platform that automatically scales your stateless containers.

Filesystem access The filesystem of your container is writable and is subject to the following behavior:

This is an in-memory filesystem, so writing to it uses the container instance's memory. Data written to the filesystem does not persist when the container instance is stopped.

You can use Google Cloud Storage, Firestore or Cloud SQL if your application is stateful.

3 Great Options for Persistent Storage with Cloud Run

What's the default storage for Google Cloud Run?

Answer 2

Cloud Run (fully managed) has known services that's not yet supported including Filestore which is also a persistent storage. However, you can consider running your Docker image on Cloud Run Anthos which runs on GKE and there you can use persistent volumes which are typically backed by Compute Engine persistent disks.

Answer 3

Having persistent storage in (fully managed) Cloud Run should be possible now. Cloud Run's second generation execution environment (gen2) supports network mounted file systems.

Here are some alternatives:

1. Cloud Run + GCS: Using Cloud Storage FUSE with Cloud Run tutorial
2. Cloud Run + Filestore: Using Filestore with Cloud Run tutorial

If you need help deciding between those, check this:

• Design an optimal storage strategy for your cloud workload

NOTE: At the time of this answer, Cloud Run gen2 is in Preview.

Answer 4

As of early 2024, it is possible to mount volumes to Cloud Run containers !

You can either mount a Cloud Storage Bucket, which uses Cloud Storage FUSE in the background to sync your files. You should be aware of the performance and concurrency issues that you will encounter, but in many read-only cases, it works perfectly.

You can also mount an In-memory Volume, which you can use to either limit the amount of memory per instance, or share between instances.

These features are currently in beta.