Cloud Run stays "warm" in between requests, so in practice I see a few seconds delay the first time I visit one of my applications but then everything loads quickly (without the cold start) for subsequent requests. This is a great fit for my stuff that works on top of SQLite, since I'm building interfaces for people to explore a database - so they're likely to continue running different queries against the same tables for a period of several minutes, ideally while those stay in RAM. On "serverless" - completely agree, it's a terrible name. The definition I've chosen to embrace for it is "scale to zero", which means I don't have to spend any money on hosting my applications unless they are actively serving traffic. Since I have over 100 side-projects running at any given time this characteristic is extremely useful!