I think GCP's long term strategy is still to move all devops work into Google. They've stated this with GAE for awhile, and this is a logical extension move as

I think GCP's long term strategy is still to move all devops work into Google. They've stated this with GAE for awhile, and this is a logical extension move as part of that strategy for app devs who like to "SSH into their machines". Like a lot of "cloud services", this is indeed nothing you can't do on your own box, and I imagine tens of thousands of people have done it before and will do it again on AWS. Google has now done it in a way that generalizes for everyone. Aside from what it lists on the page (installing the GC SDK and setting up authentication), Google handles all of the opsy stuff you would need to do on your own. Running a Linux server and installing / authenticating an SDK is not really that hard, of course, but it's one less thing to worry about when developing an app. That's almost always always a good thing.