As builders, many of us are accustomed to making tough architectural or technical decisions, often weighing the complex tradeoffs between two choices. Not surprisingly, we tend to get excited when a new solution helps to break this paradigm. Ultimately, we want to write code that offers interesting functionality and extensible architecture, but is easy to maintain, analyze, and monitor, and can be run anywhere. Today, we’re pleased to announce a new technology integration between Google Cloud Platform and NodeSource that will help teams make this dream a reality.

Building modern, source-centric, and container-based applications comes with a price we must pay. These are the boring but difficult parts of developing, deploying, and managing an application, especially its infrastructure: orchestrating source-to-container workflows, routing and managing traffic during deployment, auto-scaling your workloads, or binding running services to eventing ecosystems.

The market has responded by offering new execution models such as Functions as a Service (FaaS), which empower companies to build applications faster by deploying small snippets of code without having to be concerned about the complexities of the infrastructure that runs it.

FaaS isn’t all that serverless has to offer though.

Today, Google Cloud announced a new service empowering developers to focus on their code’s business value rather than being distracted by the mundane yet necessary grind of managing your infrastructure: Google Cloud Run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) empowers developers to run serverless workloads anywhere without having to be concerned about the underlying infrastructure complexities.

For Node.js developers, this is good news as it provides a simpler experience for deploying stateless services to GKE. To complement convenience with control, NodeSource offers our deep expertise in Node.js performance monitoring by providing a version of the N|Solid runtime for Cloud Run.

As a Google Cloud partner, NodeSource has made an N|Solid base-image available for Cloud Run on GKE, which provides developers with a drop-and-replace Node.js runtime that delivers sophisticated performance insights out of the box and in production with zero code-modification.

Deploying an application with N|Solid is as easy as:

1. Signing up for a free account at accounts.nodesource.com
2. Setting up your N|Solid Console on GKE, and
3. Creating a Node.js Docker file and uploading your image to your Google Container Registry

You can view the getting started guide here.

Following these easy steps allows users to leverage the N|Solid Console and access more than 50 performance metrics and get deep insights into their Node.js processes’ host system, the process itself, the internal behavior of Node.js, and the internal behavior of the V8 JavaScript engine. This includes real-time performance monitoring, CPU profiling, heap snapshot comparisons, as well as customizable notifications that can be configured for delivery via email, webhooks, or directly to Slack.

We intend to make improvements over time to the N|Solid user experience for teams using Cloud Run, and we’re excited to support you, the user, as part of that journey. With Cloud Run providing a frictionless path to help you run your serverless workloads anywhere, we’re excited to offer a runtime and performance monitoring solution that helps you do so with confidence.