--- title: "A Guide to AI Cold Starts on Cloud Run" url: https://daily.dev/posts/a-guide-to-ai-cold-starts-on-cloud-run-dtusct8tg source_url: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/a-guide-to-ai-cold-starts-on-cloud-run type: article source: "Google Cloud" published: 2026-05-27T21:01:40.081Z updated: 2026-05-27T23:42:31.949Z tags: ["gcp", "serverless", "vllm"] reading_time: 11 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # A Guide to AI Cold Starts on Cloud Run **[Google Cloud](https://daily.dev/sources/gcp)** · 11 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A deep dive into optimizing AI cold starts on Google Cloud Run with GPUs. Covers the four phases of an AI cold start (infrastructure provisioning, image streaming, engine initialization, and model/VRAM loading), and provides actionable strategies for each. Key recommendations include using concurrent Cloud Storage downloads for model weights, 4-bit quantization, GGUF/Safetensors formats, Startup CPU Boost, Direct VPC Egress with Private Google Access, and proper concurrency tuning. Also covers scaling strategies like single-region always-on deployments, proactive wake-up calls using non-inference endpoints, and startup probe configuration. Includes production lessons from Elastic, which serves millions of daily requests across 17+ model variants on Cloud Run using eager execution, standalone LoRA checkpoints, and per-workload service isolation. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The Hidden Cost of Cold Starts in Serverless AI Workloads](https://daily.dev/posts/the-hidden-cost-of-cold-starts-in-serverless-ai-workloads-kptdj5xct) · DigitalOcean Community · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [10 questions for your startup developers](https://daily.dev/posts/10-questions-for-your-startup-developers-skgdx36bf) · Google Cloud · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#gcp](https://daily.dev/tags/gcp), [#serverless](https://daily.dev/tags/serverless), [#vllm](https://daily.dev/tags/vllm) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/a-guide-to-ai-cold-starts-on-cloud-run-dtusct8tg)