Migrating from Exabytes to Google Cloud Run Malaysia

Escaping the Shared Hosting Trap

Exabytes serves a purpose for entry-level sites, but as your Malaysian business scales, legacy shared hosting architectures (cPanel, Apache, localized MySQL) become a severe bottleneck. Uptime drops, deployments are manual via FTP, and scaling requires buying a bigger VPS rather than elastic auto-scaling.

The modern solution is containerization via Docker and deployment to Serverless platforms like Google Cloud Run, specifically utilizing the asia-southeast1 (Singapore) region for ultra-low latency to Malaysia.

1. Containerizing the Application

Whether you run a Node.js (Next.js) app or a headless WordPress setup, the first step is wrapping it in a Dockerfile.

For a Next.js application, use a multi-stage build to keep the image lightweight:

# Build Stage
FROM node:18-alpine AS builder
WORKDIR /app
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm ci
COPY . .
RUN npm run build

# Production Stage
FROM node:18-alpine AS runner
WORKDIR /app
COPY --from=builder /app/next.config.js ./
COPY --from=builder /app/public ./public
COPY --from=builder /app/.next/standalone ./
COPY --from=builder /app/.next/static ./.next/static

EXPOSE 8080
ENV PORT=8080
CMD ["node", "server.js"]

2. Deploying to Cloud Run

Once containerized, push the image to Google Artifact Registry and deploy to Cloud Run.

# Build and submit the image
gcloud builds submit --tag asia-southeast1-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/repo/app-name

# Deploy to Cloud Run
gcloud run deploy app-name \
  --image asia-southeast1-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/repo/app-name \
  --region asia-southeast1 \
  --allow-unauthenticated \
  --port 8080 \
  --max-instances 10 \
  --cpu-boost

Cloud Run will automatically scale from 0 to 10 instances based on traffic, meaning you only pay for exact compute milliseconds used.

3. Decoupling the Database

Cloud Run is stateless. You must migrate your local Exabytes MySQL database to Google Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL or MySQL). Connect Cloud Run to Cloud SQL securely using the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy via Unix sockets, avoiding public IP exposure.

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