Guide to Reducing AI Cold Starts on Cloud Run
🧭 This article examines practical strategies to reduce AI cold-start latency on Cloud Run when serving GPU-backed models. It outlines the four-phase cold-start process, highlights storage and model-format choices (Cloud Storage, container images, GGUF, Safetensors, quantization), and explains Cloud Run features like image streaming, temporary CPU boosts, and concurrency tuning. The piece also shares operational tactics—warmup endpoints, startup probe tuning, regional deployment choices—and production patterns used by Elastic to treat GPUs as fungible compute.
