Need a low-cost, high-performance way to run long-lived, stateful workloads such as AI agents? Today, we introduced Cloud Run instances, which let you do just that.
Consider AI agents such as OpenClaw or Hermes, which are intended for individual developers or personal use. Because these agents often work continuously and tend to serve only one user at a time, their infrastructure requirements look quite different from stateless, high-throughput web services that typically run on Cloud Run services.
Cloud Run services scale to zero when requests stop, so they aren’t ideal for a long-lived agent that expects exactly one copy to be running continuously. On the other hand, the alternative — running a dedicated VM — means paying for full compute 24/7, managing operating system updates, opening firewall ports, and provisioning your own HTTPS endpoints.
Cloud Run instances provide dedicated, singleton compute runtimes on Cloud Run. They have the following attributes:
Runs just one instance with no autoscaling
Up to 7-day continuous runtime, with automatic restart policy configured by default
Every instance gets a HTTPS URL that remains unchanged across updates and restarts.
You can stop each instance when you aren't using it and resume it whenever you need it
The cost to run a Cloud Run instance with 1 vCPU and 1 GiB of memory continuously for 30 days is $5.70. Cloud Run instances use shared vCPU with vCPU burst budgets to run continuously for a low, predictable price. This model is also ideal for long-lived agents that aren’t doing compute-intensive work all the time, and only spike in usage when asked to perform a task.
OpenClaw is an open-source personal AI agent that can perform various tasks on your behalf, and become a better assistant over time. Many OpenClaw users start out running it on their own laptops, until they realize they need somewhere to run it where it won’t shut down every time their laptop goes to sleep.
Deploying OpenClaw to a Cloud Run instance is easy. Once you’ve uploaded OpenClaw’s configuration files to a Cloud Storage bucket, you can deploy your OpenClaw agent to a Cloud Run instance with just one command:
Once deployed, you can keep this OpenClaw instance running for as long as you want. You can interact with it over Telegram, WhatsApp, or the social media platform of your choice, and connect it to any tools you want it to use, as well.
For the full instructions on how to deploy OpenClaw, refer to this codelab. Coming soon, we’re also launching SSH access for both Cloud Run instances and Cloud Run services. Sign up for private access here.
Cloud Run instances are helping Google Cloud users achieve their goals for running AI agents and other long-lived workloads at low cost and high performance.
OffDeal, an AI-powered investment bank for small businesses, is running long-lived agents on Cloud Run instances: “We're currently using Cloud Run instances as our primary infrastructure for our long-running agent. It reduced cold starts by 88%. Everything was very straightforward to implement, and it has been very reliable.” - Luis Ruiz Morel, Member of Technical Staff @ OffDeal
Currently in preview, Cloud Run instances are a cost-effective way to run a new kind of workload, without sacrificing performance. For more information about Cloud Run instances, check out the following resources: