The Google Cloud Shell

While the Google Cloud Console is an intuitive tool capable of many high-level management tasks, there are many cases that call for more powerful and expressive tools. For these cases, Google offers an innovative solution: the Google Cloud Shell. The Google Cloud Shell is a free, fully managed, interactive web-based shell with deep integrations into the Cloud Console and the rest of the Google Cloud Platform.

The Google Cloud Shell is one of many components built into the GCP ecosystem geared for developer and operational enablement. Other components include version control with source repositories, container builder, and deployment manager for build processes and continuous delivery applications, IDE integrations, and cloud service emulators for local development, to name a few. Taken as a whole, this suite of tools and services makes developing services for GCP a seamless experience.

Cloud Shell runs on top of a g1-small Google Compute Engine instance sporting Debian Linux 8 (jessie). This VM is provisioned on a per-session basis, and the underlying resources are regularly recycled. To facilitate a productive developer environment, the Cloud Shell preserves the user's $HOME directory by backing it with a 5 GB persistent disk. Changes made outside of this directory will be lost between sessions and so should be treated as ephemeral.

All the normal Linux tools are available here, and the shell comes preconfigured with many developer tools such as Google Cloud command-line tools and SDKs. Additionally, the Cloud Shell supports many popular programming languages including Java, Go, Node.js, Python, Ruby, PHP, and .NET Core, as well as build and dependency management tools for these languages.

The combination of an on-demand shell available from anywhere you can access a modern browser and the rich collection of pre-installed developer tools, makes the Cloud Shell an extremely powerful and convenient tool for interacting with the Google Cloud Platform.