Google cloud run is essentially here is a docker image that listens on the $PORT env variable. Spin it up when you get requests. It will handle X queries per second (you can set limit). If more than X, scale it up to this many replicas.

I pay about 10 cents for my site. Zero maintenance. I push code to GitHub, GitHub builds an image, pushes to GCR and tells cloud run to use new image.

This is how things ought to work for simple web server like functionality. “Here’s a dockerfile and source tree, build it, run it and auto scale it with this https domain” Boom!

I pay 10 cents a month to google. They have no shame charging me 3 cents on my credit card.

I would argue that the complexity cost is ongoing not just front loaded. There is an overhead for every new application. For instance putting it in a Docker image, deploying it using gitops flavour of the month and then any extra policy management and routing.

Security, OS patches, maintaince and more than anything DDOS attacks. I don't want to handle all that, I just want to concentrate on development not maintaince.

It's only managed in the same way that AWS Elastic Beanstalk is managed.