Deploying to Google Cloud Run: A Practical First Deploy

During Bangkit Academy I deployed backend services to Google Cloud Platform for the first time. Cloud Run quickly became my favourite way to ship a containerised app without managing servers.

The mental model

Cloud Run runs your container and scales it from zero to many based on traffic. You only pay while requests are being served. Your job is to give it a container that listens on the port in $PORT.

The happy path

1. Write a Dockerfile that builds and starts your app.
2. Build and push the image to Artifact Registry.
3. Deploy with gcloud run deploy and pick a region.

gcloud run deploy my-service \
  --source . \
  --region asia-southeast2 \
  --allow-unauthenticated

What surprised me

Cold starts are real but small for lightweight services, and wiring Cloud SQL needs the connector configured — not just a connection string.