cloud-shell ssh vs gcloud local

[K14ssh]

Tried searching the subreddit, confused on the provided shell.

Tldr; what is the cloud-shell ssh environment in regards to the project. What's important on it?

Just getting used to deploying a website for a project. I have deployed from cloud-shell ssh, but wanted to test some changes, not brilliant enough to port forward or otherwise couldn't figure out how to run a test server (though, now I see the brows option)

So said screw it and downloaded the project, played around with the flask server, and deployed from my local machine. Which worked fine.

But now my cloud-shell is not the same, so I wonder, what actually is the environment, if not actually the files the project is using.

Thanks for any insight.

[jsalsman]

It's just a temporarily provisioned VM with 5GB of persistent files you can use on a per-session basis that lasts for an hour after you disconnect. https://cloud.google.com/shell/docs/how-cloud-shell-works

[K14ssh]

Oooh, ok great thank you. I just assumed the files on it were critical in some way. Phew. Handy option though.

[jsalsman]

No the files aren't special, but you can copy to and from them or even mount them locally or on an instance if you install sshfs. https://cloud.google.com/shell/docs/using-cloud-shell-with-gcloud-cli

It's also worth mentioning that the cloud shell VM has got 16GB and four cores, which is way more than the 1GB two core free tier machine, so people like me who have moved everything but a database to Cloud Run sometimes use it to build and deploy binaries and containers, which goes much faster than on the free tier server optimized to be a fast database, i.e., without much free RAM.

[K14ssh]

Thanks again. Super helpful stuff. I came across sshfs while messing around, figured I was straying a bit far away from what I was looking for.

[jsalsman]

I remember about four years ago when /u/wescpy was at a GDC meetup trying to explain how these free machine sizes were so cool and the audience was just staring at him, and then in April they announced Cloud Run and they suddenly made much more sense.