Deploying My .NET Blog Site to Google Cloud Run

Deploying My .NET Blog to Google Cloud Run

I moved my personal blog from a slow host to Google Cloud Platform because I wanted faster load times and some real cloud deployment experience. Here is how it went, warts and all.

Setting up the project

I created a new project in GCP and enabled the services I needed:

Cloud Run for hosting the container
Artifact Registry to store Docker images
IAM roles so my account could actually deploy

I also installed the Google Cloud SDK and checked I could talk to GCP from the command line.

Getting the app ready

My blog is a .NET app, so the first step was making sure it would run inside a container. The gotcha: Cloud Run expects your app to listen on port 8080 (or whatever is in the PORT environment variable).

My app was originally set to run on port 5000 for no good reason.

I updated Program.cs so it uses the provided port:

var port = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("PORT") ?? "8080";
app.Urls.Add($"http://0.0.0.0:{port}");
app.Run();

Before pushing anything, I checked the container locally:

docker build -t myblog-app .
docker run -p 8080:8080 -e PORT=8080 myblog-app

Everything worked at http://localhost:8080.

Pushing to Artifact Registry

I originally tried pushing to Container Registry (GCR) but ran into 403 permission errors on Windows. I fought with OAuth and IAM for a while, then switched to Artifact Registry to get unstuck:

docker tag myblog-app europe-west2-docker.pkg.dev/my-blog-website-470819/myblog-app-repo/myblog-app:latest
docker push europe-west2-docker.pkg.dev/my-blog-website-470819/myblog-app-repo/myblog-app:latest

Deploying to Cloud Run

Once the image was in Artifact Registry, deployment was straightforward:

gcloud run deploy myblog-app \
  --image europe-west2-docker.pkg.dev/my-blog-website-470819/myblog-app-repo/myblog-app:latest \
  --platform managed \
  --region europe-west2 \
  --allow-unauthenticated \
  --min-instances 1

Cloud Run handles scaling, HTTPS, and keeping instances warm if you want that.

After a few minutes, the blog was live.

Cost tweaks

I noticed it was costing around 9p for 12 hours with one instance always running. That is tiny, but it adds up if you leave it on for months.

CPU and memory: I dropped the instance size from 1 vCPU / 512MB to 0.25 vCPU / 256MB. The blog is light, so it did not need the bigger size.
Minimum instances: If I set it to zero I save money, but the first request after idle gets a cold start. Keeping one small instance warm gives me faster load times for a small baseline cost.

Right now I am experimenting with the best balance.

What I learned

Port config matters: Cloud Run provides $PORT and you need to bind to it.
Local testing helps: running the container locally saved me a lot of headache.
Artifact Registry is easier: less OAuth pain on Windows (for me, anyway).

Next steps

I want to:

Set up a custom domain
Trim the Docker image size to speed up cold starts
Add logging and monitoring so I can see traffic and errors properly

Overall this was fun, and my blog is definitely quicker now.