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by stephendicato 3906 days 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.
3 comments
metric10 3906 days 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.

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stephendicato 3906 days 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.

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nivertech 3906 days 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.

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maratd 3906 days 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/pnhec...

I use it every day. Easily access any SSH server from the browser.

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