Hi

Thanks for reading.

Firstly, you aren't on Kubernetes, and you haven't a cluster to manage, it's a big difference at developer point of view.

Then, HPA is based on CPU and Memory (and now on Custom Metrics) to scale up and down. Cloud Run is based on Knative and the scalability is based on the network traffic.

According with your use cases (like websites, backend APIs) traffic based auto scaling is often better.

Anyway, the big difference is the cluster management. Because you are on a managed platform, and you pay as you use, I propose 3 solutions in this article to manage the cold starts with their respectives tradeoffs.