Google Cloud Shell

Google Cloud Shell is a command line interface to integrate you with the google cloud experience. It is available in a number of versions for Windows, Linux and in browser.

Cloud Shell is a temporary Compute Engine VM which comes with 5GB of persistent disk storage ($home dir). It comes installed with a number of applications such as Cloud SDK, Java, phython etc.

Gcloud commands are broken up into the following :

gCloud | Service | Resource | Verb

There are some important concepts to remember:

• Cloud shell is tied to the account, not the project
• Server is not persistent
• Resources in $home are available after reboot, but all other resoruces or preemptive
• Cloud Shell can response to JSON API requests
• APIs can be queried with the API Explorer (Swagger)

• You can use google cloud client libraries –  https://cloud.google.com/apis/docs/cloud-client-libraries

• Temporary Compute Engine VM
• Command-line access to the instance via a browser
• 5 GB of persistent disk storage ($HOME dir)
• Pre-installed Cloud SDK and other tools
• gcloud: for working with Google Compute Engine and many GCP services
• gsutil: for working with Cloud Storage
• kubectl: for working with Google Container Engine and Kubernetes
• bq: for working with BigQuery
• Language support for Java, Go, Python, Node.js, PHP, and Ruby
• Web preview functionality
• Built-in authorization for access to resources and instances

After 1 hour of inactivity, the Cloud Shell instance is recycled. Only the /home directory persists. Any changes made to the system configuration, including environment variables, are lost between sessions.