StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Serverless
  4. Serverless Task Processing
  5. Google Cloud Run vs Zappa

Google Cloud Run vs Zappa

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Zappa
Zappa
Stacks68
Followers99
Votes0
Google Cloud Run
Google Cloud Run
Stacks290
Followers243
Votes62

Google Cloud Run vs Zappa: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Google Cloud Run and Zappa, two popular technologies for deploying serverless applications. Both Google Cloud Run and Zappa offer solutions for running serverless functions, but there are some important distinctions to consider.

  1. Deployment Environment: Google Cloud Run provides a managed runtime environment where developers can deploy containerized applications. It supports any language, framework, or library that can run within a Docker container. On the other hand, Zappa is specifically designed for serverless web applications on AWS Lambda, and it leverages the Python ecosystem for development and deployment.

  2. Platform Compatibility: While Google Cloud Run offers a multi-cloud solution and is compatible with AWS, Azure, and other cloud providers, Zappa is tightly integrated with AWS Lambda and relies heavily on AWS services and infrastructure, limiting its compatibility with other cloud platforms.

  3. Auto Scaling and Scaling Policies: Google Cloud Run automatically handles the scaling of container instances based on incoming request traffic. It offers horizontal scaling by creating more instances to handle increased load. In contrast, Zappa relies on AWS Lambda's built-in auto-scaling capability, which scales based on the number of incoming events and concurrent invocations.

  4. Pricing Model: Google Cloud Run pricing is based on the number of requested CPU and memory resources, as well as the duration of each request. This model offers more flexibility in controlling costs, but can require careful optimization for cost-effective usage. Zappa, being tightly integrated with AWS Lambda, follows AWS Lambda's pricing model based on the number of invocations, with additional charges for duration and allocated memory.

  5. Cold Start and Initialization Time: Google Cloud Run faces cold starts when idle containers need to be initialized to handle incoming requests. The initialization time can vary depending on the size and complexity of the container, resulting in potentially longer cold start times. Zappa, on the other hand, benefits from AWS Lambda's automatic container reuse, which reduces cold starts and provides faster response times for subsequent invocations.

  6. Integration with Additional Cloud Services: Google Cloud Run offers seamless integration with other services in the Google Cloud ecosystem, such as Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, and Cloud SQL, enabling developers to build more complex applications. While Zappa supports various AWS services, its integration options are more limited compared to the extensive suite of Google Cloud services.

In summary, Google Cloud Run provides a multi-cloud, language-agnostic containerized runtime environment with automatic scaling, while Zappa is a Python-centric framework tightly integrated with AWS Lambda, offering seamless integration with AWS services and reduced cold start times. The choice between Google Cloud Run and Zappa depends on factors such as platform compatibility, deployment requirements, pricing model, and desired integration options.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Zappa, Google Cloud Run

Clifford
Clifford

Software Engineer at Bidvest Advisory Services

Mar 28, 2020

Decided

Run cloud service containers instead of cloud-native services

  • Running containers means that your microservices are not "cooked" into a cloud provider's architecture.
  • Moving from one cloud to the next means that you simply spin up new instances of your containers in the new cloud using that cloud's container service.
  • Start redirecting your traffic to the new resources.
  • Turn off the containers in the cloud you migrated from.
71.3k views71.3k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Zappa
Zappa
Google Cloud Run
Google Cloud Run

Zappa makes it super easy to deploy all Python WSGI applications on AWS Lambda + API Gateway. Think of it as "serverless" web hosting for your Python web apps. That means infinite scaling, zero downtime, zero maintenance - and at a fraction of the cost of your current deployments!

A managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. It's serverless by abstracting away all infrastructure management.

-
Simple developer experience; Fast autoscaling; Managed; Any language, any library, any binary; Leverage container workflows and standards; Redundancy; Integrated logging and monitoring; Built on Knative; Custom domains
Statistics
Stacks
68
Stacks
290
Followers
99
Followers
243
Votes
0
Votes
62
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 11
    HTTPS endpoints
  • 10
    Pay per use
  • 10
    Fully managed
  • 7
    Concurrency: multiple requests sent to each container
  • 7
    Serverless
Integrations
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon API Gateway
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Cloud Build
Google Cloud Build
Docker
Docker
Knative
Knative

What are some alternatives to Zappa, Google Cloud Run?

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.

Azure Functions

Azure Functions

Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems.

Serverless

Serverless

Build applications comprised of microservices that run in response to events, auto-scale for you, and only charge you when they run. This lowers the total cost of maintaining your apps, enabling you to build more logic, faster. The Framework uses new event-driven compute services, like AWS Lambda, Google CloudFunctions, and more.

Google Cloud Functions

Google Cloud Functions

Construct applications from bite-sized business logic billed to the nearest 100 milliseconds, only while your code is running

Knative

Knative

Knative provides a set of middleware components that are essential to build modern, source-centric, and container-based applications that can run anywhere: on premises, in the cloud, or even in a third-party data center

OpenFaaS

OpenFaaS

Serverless Functions Made Simple for Docker and Kubernetes

Nuclio

Nuclio

nuclio is portable across IoT devices, laptops, on-premises datacenters and cloud deployments, eliminating cloud lock-ins and enabling hybrid solutions.

Apache OpenWhisk

Apache OpenWhisk

OpenWhisk is an open source serverless platform. It is enterprise grade and accessible to all developers thanks to its superior programming model and tooling. It powers IBM Cloud Functions, Adobe I/O Runtime, Naver, Nimbella among others.

Cloud Functions for Firebase

Cloud Functions for Firebase

Cloud Functions for Firebase lets you create functions that are triggered by Firebase products, such as changes to data in the Realtime Database, uploads to Cloud Storage, new user sign ups via Authentication, and conversion events in Analytics.

AWS Batch

AWS Batch

It enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. It dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (e.g., CPU or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase