You have been asked to build backend using Clojure and host it on Google Cloud with full freedom of choosing OS, applications, libraries, etc. Which service will you prefer?

Google Compute Engine provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), giving users complete control over the virtual machines, including the choice of operating system, custom software, libraries, and runtime environments. This level of control is essential for specific language runtimes like Clojure that might require particular configurations or dependencies not natively supported by more managed platforms.

App Engine Standard is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that supports specific runtimes (like Java, Python, Node.js, Go, PHP, Ruby) and offers limited flexibility for custom OS or library choices, which might not natively support Clojure.

Cloud Functions is a Function as a Service (FaaS) platform designed for event-driven, serverless execution of small, single-purpose functions, supporting a limited set of runtimes and not providing OS-level control or suitability for an entire backend application.

Cloud Run is a serverless platform for containerized applications, offering more flexibility than Cloud Functions or App Engine Standard by running any language that can be containerized, but Compute Engine still provides more granular control over the underlying VM and OS.