13 ms·

Google Cloud Shell

325 points by mikecb 11y ago

p0ppe 11y ago
> Use of the Cloud Shell is free through the end of 2015: you will not be charged for any resource utilization. Would be nice if they could have stated how much it's going to cost later on. We're less than three months from 2016.
- Filligree 11y ago
  Well, it's a micro instance. At most it'll cost what a micro instance costs.
  - CamatHN 11y ago
    0.005 p/h ~ $3.60 per month for those who were wondering.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      So $1.20 more per month than more powerful VPS from competitors like OVH.
      - markvdb 11y ago
        I normally am quite reserved about language use, but comparing google to OVH? Seriously? OVH is a dysfunctional company that somehow turns a profit. We almost lost our company's domain name twice due to their incompetence.
        limeyy 11y ago
        Twice? Well....
        markvdb 11y ago
        Which is why we moved away from them of course...
        wineisfine 11y ago
        Right, ovh is fine as long as you don't need their support
        hbogert 11y ago
        Why is OVH dysfunctional? My dedicated server is running splendid for 2y now.
        KirinDave 11y ago
        Their customer service is notoriously... "hit or miss."
        vidarh 11y ago
        Sounds like Google. (Used OVH for several years, but my server with them has an uptime of 1034 days as of today, so customer service might very well be useless - I've never had a reason to talk to them)
        KirinDave 11y ago
        I used OVH and had a terrible, terrible, demanded a refund experience. But I have something that approximates bad luck. See my earlier posts about Project Fi.
        markvdb 11y ago
        For non-critical things, they provide relatively good value for money. For critical things, I wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole.
        hyyypr 11y ago
        Please, make your contribution worth something by explaining your issues with OVH. I've been a very happy customer for years now.
        markvdb 11y ago
        We paid OVH for the renewal of our company's domain name several weeks before its expiration. This domain hosted our google apps for business and more. We received an invoice and bank statements for that. OVH never renewed with the registry. We only got to know about this because of a standard email warning from the country's registry (not OVH as a registrar) itself about quarantaine and expiry! We spent over eight hours over several days talking to OVH. I have been able to verify that the problem was on the side of OVH only, and not on the registry's side at all. In the end, we made a direct payment to the registry to make sure the domain was not deleted.
      - CydeWeys 11y ago
        I understand worrying about burn rate and all that, but when the entire service costs the same as a single cup of coffee per month, it might just not matter. How well it works, what features it provides, and how well it interfaces with the rest of the cloud services you're using are much, much more important concerns than saving a buck a month.
        kuschku 11y ago
        Well, not always. As a student, you don’t want to spend 4$ for a cloud console, plus 4$ for cloud IRC, plus 20$ for a VPS, plus 12$ for your phone contract, plus 120$ for a new phone every 2 years... I – like most people – don’t let useless devices run on standby either, costing me upwards of 30$ a year for a TV on standby. As a student, I don’t buy totally overpriced coffee that costs that much either.
        anthony_d 11y ago
        A sure sign of a weak argument is including the phrase "... like most people ..." Do you really think most people unplug their televisions after using them?
        kuschku 11y ago
        Most people use socket strips with switches for their TV, yes. At 40ct per kWh, no one can afford to let that shit run 24/7.
        aianus 11y ago
        Where is that? That's literally 4-6x more expensive than my electricity.
        kuschku 11y ago
        Germany, for example (Where I live). Most people don’t live in the US, and for most people wasting 1.20$ for a product where you save one or two lines of code to integrate it is not okay. I seriously rewrote several web products myself that I'd have to normally pay 4$ or so per month for. I took over development for the QuasselDroid Android client because I could not afford IRCCloud. I ended up rewriting all the features of Reddit Gold last night as a browser extension because I can’t afford wasting money on Reddit Gold. It’s problematic wasting money in one place, but for a dozen services at once? Nope, that’s gonna bankrupt a student who has no income except for a small grant.
    - boulos 11y ago
      That's the rate though. For little sessions here and there during your working hours and per-minute billing, I feel like it'll be unusual to do more than say 5 hours a week even if you often forget to exit before the "garbage collector" turns it off for you. That gets you into below $1/month territory pretty easily. Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine but not Cloud Shell.
  - zmmmmm 11y ago
    There seems to be 5GB of associated storage ... would be interested to know if they are charging for that or if it's part of your wider Google allocation or if there's an ongoing cost once you generate data in there that will keep charging forever, even if you use the service only intermittently?
- metric10 11y ago
  They likely don't know how this is going to be used, so they want to gather usage statistics (both user and resource) to determine what it should cost.
- Corrado 11y ago
  Another question is how much bandwidth do you get for free? Could I run a torrent tracker on it or SSH tunnel video streams?
colinbartlett 11y ago
Wait, so this runs in a browser? Is the idea that you can then use a machine like a Chromebook to handle your development?
- SjuulJanssen 11y ago
  It's still a vm. It uses the browser to "ssh" into the machine. They've got that functionality fol all other vm's as well. Now they offer this "ssh as a service"
- csells 11y ago
  That's absolutely the goal, Colin. Give it a try and let us know what you think. Chris Sells Cloud Developer Tooling Product Manager csells@google.com
- KirinDave 11y ago
  It becomes increasingly clear over time why Google is investing so heavily in the "web pages that have the capabilities, performance and experience of a desktop application" branches of modern browser development now. And the new Nexus Tablet, everyone hoping it will run Android Studio? It's entirely possible next year we'll see JetBrains and Google convert that environment over to web as well. JB's been doing a lot of that work independently, already.
rexignis 11y ago
I like this, and it feels "Google-y". Worried that a handful of us will use it, lean on it heavily, and then Google will do what Google does and pull the plug on it.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  Well in all honesty if you end up leaning on it heavily in spite of the warning you kind of deserve whatever you get... >This is a Beta release of Cloud Shell. This feature is not covered by any SLA or deprecation policy and may be subject to backward-incompatible changes.
  - rexignis 11y ago
    I wasn't explicit with my earlier comment, you're right about the beta period. I was referring to after when they exit beta and are a good, useful service for a year or two.
    - TheIronYuppie 11y ago
      Disclosure: I work for Google. To the best of my recollection, I don't believe we've ever shutdown a product. Was there one in particular that hit you? (Reader, Wave, etc are totally different divisions.)
      - rexignis 11y ago
        Google Drive hosting, to be fair it still works and you guys gave plenty of heads up (August 31, 2016). Just because they are in different divisions doesn't mean Google hasn't shut things down.
        iso-8859-1 11y ago
        Source: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2881970 https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2881970
      - 11y ago
stephendicato 11y ago
This doesn't actually appear to be new; at least not that I can tell. Google Cloud has supported being able to open an SSH session to any of your instances right from the browser for awhile. I've found it to be a killer feature and am really surprised Amazon Web Services does not offer the same thing.
- nivertech 11y ago
  I also assumed that it's just a webshell to connect to your existing instances. Only now I realized that it's a 1-click launch of O&M instance with persistent home directory (and in the future maybe persistent image as well). I hope they will give the ability to switch instance type. It's a good pattern to have an O&M node, where people are allowed to ssh, which will have all the devops scripts. You can do this with AWS' t2.micro instance and launch hyperlink and some custom webshell, but it will not be that integrated as Google Cloud Shell.
- metric10 11y ago
  It's a preconfigured VM that includes all the tools for developing for Google Cloud Platform. You just click a button on a console and you have everything you need, with a 5GB persistent $HOME directory. True, you could do everything this is doing with Compute Engine. The point is that it's always one-click away and there's no setup, maintenance, or (for the time being) cost.
  - stephendicato 11y ago
    Ah, makes sense! Thanks for the clarification. This could be a nice way to isolate operations of production infrastructure. You could go as far as issuing Chromebooks dedicated to the task.
- maratd 11y ago
  > I've found it to be a killer feature and am really surprised Amazon Web Services does not offer the same thing. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhechapfaindjhompbnflcldabbghjo?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec... I use it every day. Easily access any SSH server from the browser.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
Nice idea. I do a lot of my development SSHing to a resource rich VPS. For things that take a long time to run (Haskel stack builds, a long running machine learning calculation, etc.) it is great to not run that stuff on a laptop. Cloud Shell is a bit different in the sense you would not want to try anything resource intensive on a micro instance. But for coordinating other services it makes sense. I think Google needs to add one more thing to their cloud development toolkit: a public version of something close to their cider web based IDE that gives you access to work with any code you have in you private Google-hosted git repos, AppEngine and VPS services. nitrous.io has something like this, and I think that Google would do well to offer something similar for using the public version of their infrastructure.
- csells 11y ago
  Mark, if you'd like to try our version of a "web based IDE that gives you access to work with any code you have in your private Google-hosted git repos", check out the Source Editor feature of the Cloud Source Repositories: https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/cloud-repositories-files https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/cloud... Also, we're alpha testing some integration with the Source Editor and the Cloud Shell right now, so anyone that would like to participate in that alpha test can drop me a line: csells@google.com. Chris Sells Cloud Developer Tooling Product Manager
  - mark_l_watson 11y ago
    Thanks Chris.
- dzhiurgis 11y ago
  So far the biggest advantage of web IDE for me was ability to bypass corporate firewall. What most web IDEs still get wrong is version control. I want to work on live code and then push it to version control. I do not want another copy of code that I have to push to server and version control.
readstoomuch 11y ago
> We are also working on a solution that would persist custom packages across sessions on different VM instances. Nix?
trident523 11y ago
So, what if you don't have that button? Is there a minimum amount of product you need to have before this service becomes active?
- wstrange 11y ago
  I have two GCE accounts - one personal, where I do have the cloud console feature, and one business domain currently on a $300 trial, where the button does not show up. Curious
- fitzwatermellow 11y ago
  No button for my domain account as well. Have billing enabled. And when I attempt to send feedback on this issue, I get a "submission failed" error! Have used micro instances in the past as remote development and deployment environments and a micro instance and it works ok. Wondering if something in between micro (0.7G) and standard (3.5G) might be better considering devenv can get pretty beefed up using certain modern frameworks we won't mention by name ;)
  - codywbratt 11y ago
    Hi! We're in the process of rolling this out to all accounts over the next week or so. Stay tuned! Cody Bratt, Google Developers Console Product Manager
- codywbratt 11y ago
  No minimum, just in the process of slowly rolling this out over the next week or so. Stay tuned! Cody Bratt, Google Cloud Console Product Manager
- zmmmmm 11y ago
  I don't have it on my main Google account, so I signed into a test account that I use pretty much for testing apps, but never for anything serious, and voila, there it is. So I'm guessing it's pretty random how it is being rolled out.
andmarios 11y ago
Albeit much different, yet with some common ideas, I've created a docker “devops environment” image, that if you provide with a GCE service account, it will auto-activate google cloud and even setup ansible to work with your gce project. Emacs and vim are provided, pre-configured to a certain degree. The best usage scenario would be emacs+golang but there is basic support for other languages. There are some other conveniences too, like bash-completion being enabled (no more need for remembering all git flags). If anyone is interested or want to borrow some ideas: https://hub.docker.com/r/andmarios/devenv/ https://hub.docker.com/r/andmarios/devenv/ https://github.com/andmarios/docker/tree/master/devenv https://github.com/andmarios/docker/tree/master/devenv
mahouse 11y ago
This is cool, I just want an IRC bouncer.
Wonnk13 11y ago
Coming from an AWS shop, I guess I don't understand the use case(s) for this. What this enable me to do that I couldn't accomplish by ssh'ing to any of the boxes in my environment?
- KirinDave 11y ago
  I use AWS extensively as well, but really like this product plan. Ultimately what AWSClassic does is give you a lot of baremetal boxes to drop AMIs on. Google's changing that to the containerized model by offering direct services that are scheduled on hardware. As Kubernetes becomes more and more the primary method for deploying apps on Google's managed services, this approach will pay off more. But it's worth nothing that for many people this is what Amazon needs to do as well. As VPCs become the mandatory methodology for AWS, it's increasingly annoying just to set up the bare minimum you need to get a capable shell inside your environment. Even experienced AWS users have trouble getting VPCs right given the state of the current documentation.
  - yo-code-sucks 11y ago
    Even experienced AWS users have trouble getting VPCs right given the state of the current documentation. No, no we don't. It's quite easy, and usually it only takes us a few minutes.
    - KirinDave 11y ago
      It is great if you're not experiencing the problems we are. If you use AWS services besides S3 it can get very tricky to not overwhelm your egress and not suffer performance issues. Scaling this configuration in an elastic way is certainly not turnkey in the current VPC environment, and probably won't be until Amazon finishes something like the S3 gateway for them. And the documentation is in a sorry state.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    > As VPCs become the mandatory methodology for AWS, it's increasingly annoying just to set up the bare minimum you need to get a capable shell inside your environment. Even experienced AWS users have trouble getting VPCs right given the state of the current documentation. Please. Even for an advanced VPC configuration, you're looking at 1-2 hours tops for setup. If you want point and click, go to Digital Ocean. Complex tools are always going to have a learning curve.
swiley 11y ago
Still not good enough to compile most of their "open source" projects.
therealmarv 11y ago
Reminds me that I'm missing GoogleCL a lot. Info: Project is discontinued and not working anymore because it was using OAuth1... they could not upgrade to OAuth2 oO
kaa2102 11y ago
My company is launching a new web design and development service using Google Cloud services. Initially, this was an experiment because we received some Google Cloud hosting credits. We run LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) stacks on virtual machine instances on servers worldwide of our choosing. After Google I/O, some webinars and testing I learned about how quickly new websites and apps could be deployed, Google DNS for managing domains, App Engine and other load balancing features that can help manage cost. The ability to SSH into a virtual machine has proven quite useful to enable my team to coordinate and manage projects. I am still open to using other services like AWS but Google Cloud has been great - especially because they also offer customer service for tech and billing issues.
- chipperyman573 11y ago
  Does AWS not offer customer service for billing issues?
  - antaviana 11y ago
    Yes, it does. I had a question about a billing item and they answered a few days after.
- miles932 11y ago
  disclaimer: I work at GCP That is rad! Anything we can do to help? Link to the company?
  - kookiekrak 11y ago
    slightly unrelated, is there any way you guys could add the ability to create multiple instances with the same settings using the web interface? I'm able to do it on aws but with google cloud I have to either run the command line or manually start every instance
  - code_devil 11y ago
    I have noticed that all google cloud services now require credit card information for validation. Can this be be made optional and instead rely on their Gmail accounts ? (Especially for people just wanting to tinker with new services for fun)
paradite 11y ago
I don't see how this is better than c9.io, nitrous.io or ssh into your own VPS. I guess it is developed just for the people who use Google Cloud?
- ivan_burazin 11y ago
  We at Codeanywhere.com offer Web based SSH into any type of server as well
obulpathi 11y ago
This is perfect for services like Bastion, Gateways, CRON jobs.
brohoolio 11y ago
I've been pushing my current company towards Google cloud because of the billing. Sure AWS is great with reserved instances etc but in our environment I don't know what we will look like 6 months from now in terms of instances. With Google we'd be burning way less cash with our 100 or so instances.
iamleppert 11y ago
What's the point of this? I can already ssh into any of my instances on AWS, Linode, whatever platform. Is it just because it's in the browser. Who cares...
- wineisfine 11y ago
  I have the same question. I can ssh into all vps instances already...
- teach 11y ago
  This is a big deal for high school students. They can use a school-issued laptop, but they can't install custom software (like an ssh client), so sites like Cloud9 provide access to something that would otherwise by inaccessible to them. Source: I'm a high school teacher at just such a school.
  - userbinator 11y ago
    SSH clients do not need installation. I keep a copy of PuTTY on my USB drive for this scenario.
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      My high school did not allow running programs off of a USB drive in 2000. Would be surprised if security is lower now.
    - teach 11y ago
      Yes, but there's also a whitelist for EXEs. As a teacher I can use PuTTY without installing it, but the students can't always do so.
  - iamleppert 11y ago
    That's a problem with your high school and the device you are using which you don't have control over. We're solving problems of high school students who don't have access to an SSH client now?
betaby 11y ago
Does it have IPv6 address?
- p1mrx 11y ago
  Of course there's no IPv6 address. Compute Engine exists within a parallel universe where the IETF disbanded in 1997.
rmac 11y ago
As a long time user of googles web based terminal (accessed normally through google cloud platform console by listing your VMs and clicking the SSH button): I love it because I don't need to worry about key management and can access my machines anywhere that has a browser. However, my few gripes are: 1)when copying text out of the web terminal window that spans multiple lines (on Mac osx chrome), newlines are inserted. 2) ctrl v doesn't work (nano/pico) 3) Ctrl c sometimes doesn't work
- balls187 11y ago
  > ctrl v doesn't work (nano/pico) OT, this is a big reason why I encourage people to learn vi/vim. It doesn't rely on ctrl, and can be used in environments that do weird mappings to control characters. Anything you can do with ctrl, can be done with regular keys and commands.
  - hbogert 11y ago
    So if the environment is broken, or at least subpar when it comes to functionality, you "fix" the application?
    - balls187 11y ago
      I cut my engineering teeth having to work on a lot of disparate systems run by the US DOD: VAX, True64, PC Linux, SGI. Having a single dependable text editor that worked across all of them consistently was important. Those environments were neither "subpar", nor were they "broken."
ne01 11y ago
At SunSed.com we moved from linode to GC a year ago! It has been great! The only thing that I am currently looking for is GC HTTP(S) load balancing support for HTTP/1.1 100 Continue response.
electic 11y ago
I really wish GC had some sort of client facing VPN service so that I do not have to create VM instances that have SSH open to the public. This is a good first step, but from what I can see it does not give me access to my LAN just the gcloud cli.
i336_ 11y ago
Congratulations for getting this far down the page. Now open the shell and traceroute (install it) to google.com. :) (Other fun things: traceroute can't find your external IP; you have ~250Mbps download; you're on a Xeon with 32GB RAM of which you have 512MB; I can't remember anything else.)
rsync 11y ago
I'm going to spin this up today and see how it integrates with rsync.net. We have 'gsutil' in our environment, so you can do things like: ssh user@rsync.net gsutil ... blah ... blah ... but if there is a google shell that you can use to manipulate those same items, then presumably you could do data transfer to/from rsync.net from within that shell. Not everyone has a use-case like this, but some folks do ... so we'll see how it works ...

325 points by mikecb 11y ago

p0ppe 11y ago

> Use of the Cloud Shell is free through the end of 2015: you will not be charged for any resource utilization. Would be nice if they could have stated how much it's going to cost later on. We're less than three months from 2016.

Filligree 11y ago
Well, it's a micro instance. At most it'll cost what a micro instance costs.
- CamatHN 11y ago
  0.005 p/h ~ $3.60 per month for those who were wondering.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    So $1.20 more per month than more powerful VPS from competitors like OVH.
    - markvdb 11y ago
      I normally am quite reserved about language use, but comparing google to OVH? Seriously? OVH is a dysfunctional company that somehow turns a profit. We almost lost our company's domain name twice due to their incompetence.
      - limeyy 11y ago
        Twice? Well....
        markvdb 11y ago
        Which is why we moved away from them of course...
        wineisfine 11y ago
        Right, ovh is fine as long as you don't need their support
      - hbogert 11y ago
        Why is OVH dysfunctional? My dedicated server is running splendid for 2y now.
        KirinDave 11y ago
        Their customer service is notoriously... "hit or miss."
        vidarh 11y ago
        Sounds like Google. (Used OVH for several years, but my server with them has an uptime of 1034 days as of today, so customer service might very well be useless - I've never had a reason to talk to them)
        KirinDave 11y ago
        I used OVH and had a terrible, terrible, demanded a refund experience. But I have something that approximates bad luck. See my earlier posts about Project Fi.
        markvdb 11y ago
        For non-critical things, they provide relatively good value for money. For critical things, I wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole.
      - hyyypr 11y ago
        Please, make your contribution worth something by explaining your issues with OVH. I've been a very happy customer for years now.
        markvdb 11y ago
        We paid OVH for the renewal of our company's domain name several weeks before its expiration. This domain hosted our google apps for business and more. We received an invoice and bank statements for that. OVH never renewed with the registry. We only got to know about this because of a standard email warning from the country's registry (not OVH as a registrar) itself about quarantaine and expiry! We spent over eight hours over several days talking to OVH. I have been able to verify that the problem was on the side of OVH only, and not on the registry's side at all. In the end, we made a direct payment to the registry to make sure the domain was not deleted.
    - CydeWeys 11y ago
      I understand worrying about burn rate and all that, but when the entire service costs the same as a single cup of coffee per month, it might just not matter. How well it works, what features it provides, and how well it interfaces with the rest of the cloud services you're using are much, much more important concerns than saving a buck a month.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        Well, not always. As a student, you don’t want to spend 4$ for a cloud console, plus 4$ for cloud IRC, plus 20$ for a VPS, plus 12$ for your phone contract, plus 120$ for a new phone every 2 years... I – like most people – don’t let useless devices run on standby either, costing me upwards of 30$ a year for a TV on standby. As a student, I don’t buy totally overpriced coffee that costs that much either.
        anthony_d 11y ago
        A sure sign of a weak argument is including the phrase "... like most people ..." Do you really think most people unplug their televisions after using them?
        kuschku 11y ago
        Most people use socket strips with switches for their TV, yes. At 40ct per kWh, no one can afford to let that shit run 24/7.
        aianus 11y ago
        Where is that? That's literally 4-6x more expensive than my electricity.
        kuschku 11y ago
        Germany, for example (Where I live). Most people don’t live in the US, and for most people wasting 1.20$ for a product where you save one or two lines of code to integrate it is not okay. I seriously rewrote several web products myself that I'd have to normally pay 4$ or so per month for. I took over development for the QuasselDroid Android client because I could not afford IRCCloud. I ended up rewriting all the features of Reddit Gold last night as a browser extension because I can’t afford wasting money on Reddit Gold. It’s problematic wasting money in one place, but for a dozen services at once? Nope, that’s gonna bankrupt a student who has no income except for a small grant.
  - boulos 11y ago
    That's the rate though. For little sessions here and there during your working hours and per-minute billing, I feel like it'll be unusual to do more than say 5 hours a week even if you often forget to exit before the "garbage collector" turns it off for you. That gets you into below $1/month territory pretty easily. Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine but not Cloud Shell.
- zmmmmm 11y ago
  There seems to be 5GB of associated storage ... would be interested to know if they are charging for that or if it's part of your wider Google allocation or if there's an ongoing cost once you generate data in there that will keep charging forever, even if you use the service only intermittently?
metric10 11y ago
They likely don't know how this is going to be used, so they want to gather usage statistics (both user and resource) to determine what it should cost.
Corrado 11y ago
Another question is how much bandwidth do you get for free? Could I run a torrent tracker on it or SSH tunnel video streams?

colinbartlett 11y ago

Wait, so this runs in a browser? Is the idea that you can then use a machine like a Chromebook to handle your development?

SjuulJanssen 11y ago
It's still a vm. It uses the browser to "ssh" into the machine. They've got that functionality fol all other vm's as well. Now they offer this "ssh as a service"
csells 11y ago
That's absolutely the goal, Colin. Give it a try and let us know what you think. Chris Sells Cloud Developer Tooling Product Manager csells@google.com
KirinDave 11y ago
It becomes increasingly clear over time why Google is investing so heavily in the "web pages that have the capabilities, performance and experience of a desktop application" branches of modern browser development now. And the new Nexus Tablet, everyone hoping it will run Android Studio? It's entirely possible next year we'll see JetBrains and Google convert that environment over to web as well. JB's been doing a lot of that work independently, already.

rexignis 11y ago

I like this, and it feels "Google-y". Worried that a handful of us will use it, lean on it heavily, and then Google will do what Google does and pull the plug on it.

Klathmon 11y ago
Well in all honesty if you end up leaning on it heavily in spite of the warning you kind of deserve whatever you get... >This is a Beta release of Cloud Shell. This feature is not covered by any SLA or deprecation policy and may be subject to backward-incompatible changes.
- rexignis 11y ago
  I wasn't explicit with my earlier comment, you're right about the beta period. I was referring to after when they exit beta and are a good, useful service for a year or two.
  - TheIronYuppie 11y ago
    Disclosure: I work for Google. To the best of my recollection, I don't believe we've ever shutdown a product. Was there one in particular that hit you? (Reader, Wave, etc are totally different divisions.)
    - rexignis 11y ago
      Google Drive hosting, to be fair it still works and you guys gave plenty of heads up (August 31, 2016). Just because they are in different divisions doesn't mean Google hasn't shut things down.
      - iso-8859-1 11y ago
        Source: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2881970 https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2881970
    - 11y ago

stephendicato 11y ago

This doesn't actually appear to be new; at least not that I can tell. Google Cloud has supported being able to open an SSH session to any of your instances right from the browser for awhile. I've found it to be a killer feature and am really surprised Amazon Web Services does not offer the same thing.

nivertech 11y ago
I also assumed that it's just a webshell to connect to your existing instances. Only now I realized that it's a 1-click launch of O&M instance with persistent home directory (and in the future maybe persistent image as well). I hope they will give the ability to switch instance type. It's a good pattern to have an O&M node, where people are allowed to ssh, which will have all the devops scripts. You can do this with AWS' t2.micro instance and launch hyperlink and some custom webshell, but it will not be that integrated as Google Cloud Shell.
metric10 11y ago
It's a preconfigured VM that includes all the tools for developing for Google Cloud Platform. You just click a button on a console and you have everything you need, with a 5GB persistent $HOME directory. True, you could do everything this is doing with Compute Engine. The point is that it's always one-click away and there's no setup, maintenance, or (for the time being) cost.
- stephendicato 11y ago
  Ah, makes sense! Thanks for the clarification. This could be a nice way to isolate operations of production infrastructure. You could go as far as issuing Chromebooks dedicated to the task.
maratd 11y ago
> I've found it to be a killer feature and am really surprised Amazon Web Services does not offer the same thing. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhechapfaindjhompbnflcldabbghjo?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec... I use it every day. Easily access any SSH server from the browser.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

Nice idea. I do a lot of my development SSHing to a resource rich VPS. For things that take a long time to run (Haskel stack builds, a long running machine learning calculation, etc.) it is great to not run that stuff on a laptop. Cloud Shell is a bit different in the sense you would not want to try anything resource intensive on a micro instance. But for coordinating other services it makes sense. I think Google needs to add one more thing to their cloud development toolkit: a public version of something close to their cider web based IDE that gives you access to work with any code you have in you private Google-hosted git repos, AppEngine and VPS services. nitrous.io has something like this, and I think that Google would do well to offer something similar for using the public version of their infrastructure.

csells 11y ago
Mark, if you'd like to try our version of a "web based IDE that gives you access to work with any code you have in your private Google-hosted git repos", check out the Source Editor feature of the Cloud Source Repositories: https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/cloud-repositories-files https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/cloud... Also, we're alpha testing some integration with the Source Editor and the Cloud Shell right now, so anyone that would like to participate in that alpha test can drop me a line: csells@google.com. Chris Sells Cloud Developer Tooling Product Manager
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  Thanks Chris.
dzhiurgis 11y ago
So far the biggest advantage of web IDE for me was ability to bypass corporate firewall. What most web IDEs still get wrong is version control. I want to work on live code and then push it to version control. I do not want another copy of code that I have to push to server and version control.

readstoomuch 11y ago

> We are also working on a solution that would persist custom packages across sessions on different VM instances. Nix?

trident523 11y ago

So, what if you don't have that button? Is there a minimum amount of product you need to have before this service becomes active?

wstrange 11y ago
I have two GCE accounts - one personal, where I do have the cloud console feature, and one business domain currently on a $300 trial, where the button does not show up. Curious
fitzwatermellow 11y ago
No button for my domain account as well. Have billing enabled. And when I attempt to send feedback on this issue, I get a "submission failed" error! Have used micro instances in the past as remote development and deployment environments and a micro instance and it works ok. Wondering if something in between micro (0.7G) and standard (3.5G) might be better considering devenv can get pretty beefed up using certain modern frameworks we won't mention by name ;)
- codywbratt 11y ago
  Hi! We're in the process of rolling this out to all accounts over the next week or so. Stay tuned! Cody Bratt, Google Developers Console Product Manager
codywbratt 11y ago
No minimum, just in the process of slowly rolling this out over the next week or so. Stay tuned! Cody Bratt, Google Cloud Console Product Manager
zmmmmm 11y ago
I don't have it on my main Google account, so I signed into a test account that I use pretty much for testing apps, but never for anything serious, and voila, there it is. So I'm guessing it's pretty random how it is being rolled out.

andmarios 11y ago

Albeit much different, yet with some common ideas, I've created a docker “devops environment” image, that if you provide with a GCE service account, it will auto-activate google cloud and even setup ansible to work with your gce project. Emacs and vim are provided, pre-configured to a certain degree. The best usage scenario would be emacs+golang but there is basic support for other languages. There are some other conveniences too, like bash-completion being enabled (no more need for remembering all git flags). If anyone is interested or want to borrow some ideas: https://hub.docker.com/r/andmarios/devenv/ https://hub.docker.com/r/andmarios/devenv/ https://github.com/andmarios/docker/tree/master/devenv https://github.com/andmarios/docker/tree/master/devenv

mahouse 11y ago

This is cool, I just want an IRC bouncer.

Wonnk13 11y ago

Coming from an AWS shop, I guess I don't understand the use case(s) for this. What this enable me to do that I couldn't accomplish by ssh'ing to any of the boxes in my environment?

KirinDave 11y ago
I use AWS extensively as well, but really like this product plan. Ultimately what AWSClassic does is give you a lot of baremetal boxes to drop AMIs on. Google's changing that to the containerized model by offering direct services that are scheduled on hardware. As Kubernetes becomes more and more the primary method for deploying apps on Google's managed services, this approach will pay off more. But it's worth nothing that for many people this is what Amazon needs to do as well. As VPCs become the mandatory methodology for AWS, it's increasingly annoying just to set up the bare minimum you need to get a capable shell inside your environment. Even experienced AWS users have trouble getting VPCs right given the state of the current documentation.
- yo-code-sucks 11y ago
  Even experienced AWS users have trouble getting VPCs right given the state of the current documentation. No, no we don't. It's quite easy, and usually it only takes us a few minutes.
  - KirinDave 11y ago
    It is great if you're not experiencing the problems we are. If you use AWS services besides S3 it can get very tricky to not overwhelm your egress and not suffer performance issues. Scaling this configuration in an elastic way is certainly not turnkey in the current VPC environment, and probably won't be until Amazon finishes something like the S3 gateway for them. And the documentation is in a sorry state.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > As VPCs become the mandatory methodology for AWS, it's increasingly annoying just to set up the bare minimum you need to get a capable shell inside your environment. Even experienced AWS users have trouble getting VPCs right given the state of the current documentation. Please. Even for an advanced VPC configuration, you're looking at 1-2 hours tops for setup. If you want point and click, go to Digital Ocean. Complex tools are always going to have a learning curve.

swiley 11y ago

Still not good enough to compile most of their "open source" projects.

therealmarv 11y ago

Reminds me that I'm missing GoogleCL a lot. Info: Project is discontinued and not working anymore because it was using OAuth1... they could not upgrade to OAuth2 oO

kaa2102 11y ago

My company is launching a new web design and development service using Google Cloud services. Initially, this was an experiment because we received some Google Cloud hosting credits. We run LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) stacks on virtual machine instances on servers worldwide of our choosing. After Google I/O, some webinars and testing I learned about how quickly new websites and apps could be deployed, Google DNS for managing domains, App Engine and other load balancing features that can help manage cost. The ability to SSH into a virtual machine has proven quite useful to enable my team to coordinate and manage projects. I am still open to using other services like AWS but Google Cloud has been great - especially because they also offer customer service for tech and billing issues.

chipperyman573 11y ago
Does AWS not offer customer service for billing issues?
- antaviana 11y ago
  Yes, it does. I had a question about a billing item and they answered a few days after.
miles932 11y ago
disclaimer: I work at GCP That is rad! Anything we can do to help? Link to the company?
- kookiekrak 11y ago
  slightly unrelated, is there any way you guys could add the ability to create multiple instances with the same settings using the web interface? I'm able to do it on aws but with google cloud I have to either run the command line or manually start every instance
- code_devil 11y ago
  I have noticed that all google cloud services now require credit card information for validation. Can this be be made optional and instead rely on their Gmail accounts ? (Especially for people just wanting to tinker with new services for fun)

paradite 11y ago

I don't see how this is better than c9.io, nitrous.io or ssh into your own VPS. I guess it is developed just for the people who use Google Cloud?

ivan_burazin 11y ago
We at Codeanywhere.com offer Web based SSH into any type of server as well

obulpathi 11y ago

This is perfect for services like Bastion, Gateways, CRON jobs.

brohoolio 11y ago

I've been pushing my current company towards Google cloud because of the billing. Sure AWS is great with reserved instances etc but in our environment I don't know what we will look like 6 months from now in terms of instances. With Google we'd be burning way less cash with our 100 or so instances.

iamleppert 11y ago

What's the point of this? I can already ssh into any of my instances on AWS, Linode, whatever platform. Is it just because it's in the browser. Who cares...

wineisfine 11y ago
I have the same question. I can ssh into all vps instances already...
teach 11y ago
This is a big deal for high school students. They can use a school-issued laptop, but they can't install custom software (like an ssh client), so sites like Cloud9 provide access to something that would otherwise by inaccessible to them. Source: I'm a high school teacher at just such a school.
- userbinator 11y ago
  SSH clients do not need installation. I keep a copy of PuTTY on my USB drive for this scenario.
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    My high school did not allow running programs off of a USB drive in 2000. Would be surprised if security is lower now.
  - teach 11y ago
    Yes, but there's also a whitelist for EXEs. As a teacher I can use PuTTY without installing it, but the students can't always do so.
- iamleppert 11y ago
  That's a problem with your high school and the device you are using which you don't have control over. We're solving problems of high school students who don't have access to an SSH client now?

betaby 11y ago

Does it have IPv6 address?

p1mrx 11y ago
Of course there's no IPv6 address. Compute Engine exists within a parallel universe where the IETF disbanded in 1997.

rmac 11y ago

As a long time user of googles web based terminal (accessed normally through google cloud platform console by listing your VMs and clicking the SSH button): I love it because I don't need to worry about key management and can access my machines anywhere that has a browser. However, my few gripes are: 1)when copying text out of the web terminal window that spans multiple lines (on Mac osx chrome), newlines are inserted. 2) ctrl v doesn't work (nano/pico) 3) Ctrl c sometimes doesn't work

balls187 11y ago
> ctrl v doesn't work (nano/pico) OT, this is a big reason why I encourage people to learn vi/vim. It doesn't rely on ctrl, and can be used in environments that do weird mappings to control characters. Anything you can do with ctrl, can be done with regular keys and commands.
- hbogert 11y ago
  So if the environment is broken, or at least subpar when it comes to functionality, you "fix" the application?
  - balls187 11y ago
    I cut my engineering teeth having to work on a lot of disparate systems run by the US DOD: VAX, True64, PC Linux, SGI. Having a single dependable text editor that worked across all of them consistently was important. Those environments were neither "subpar", nor were they "broken."

ne01 11y ago

At SunSed.com we moved from linode to GC a year ago! It has been great! The only thing that I am currently looking for is GC HTTP(S) load balancing support for HTTP/1.1 100 Continue response.

electic 11y ago

I really wish GC had some sort of client facing VPN service so that I do not have to create VM instances that have SSH open to the public. This is a good first step, but from what I can see it does not give me access to my LAN just the gcloud cli.

i336_ 11y ago

Congratulations for getting this far down the page. Now open the shell and traceroute (install it) to google.com. :) (Other fun things: traceroute can't find your external IP; you have ~250Mbps download; you're on a Xeon with 32GB RAM of which you have 512MB; I can't remember anything else.)

rsync 11y ago

I'm going to spin this up today and see how it integrates with rsync.net. We have 'gsutil' in our environment, so you can do things like: ssh user@rsync.net gsutil ... blah ... blah ... but if there is a google shell that you can use to manipulate those same items, then presumably you could do data transfer to/from rsync.net from within that shell. Not everyone has a use-case like this, but some folks do ... so we'll see how it works ...