from Hacker News

Free Linux cloud shell for Gmail users

by mondainx on 1/27/18, 7:12 PM with 86 comments

• by thesandlord on 1/27/18, 9:30 PM

  (I work for Google Cloud)

  If you want to learn more about Cloud Shell, the marketing page is here: https://cloud.google.com/shell/

  Cloud Shell is one of my favorite things about GCP. A lot of dev tools (Docker, Python/Go/Node/Ruby/Java/.Net, etc) are pre-installed, you can test "localhost" servers with the preview feature, there is a built in file editor (based on the open source Orion project), etc. And it's all free!

  This link will directly open the shell in a full page, and I'm not sure it will work unless you have set up your GCP account before. It's really not designed to be opened this way, I recommend opening it from the GCP console and then making it full screen if your want.

  Also note: Cloud Shell gives you a persistent 5GB /home Directory, but every other folder is reset after a while. If you want to add your own binaries, I'd recommend adding home to your path and installing them there.

• by jwilk on 1/27/18, 9:50 PM

  Before you get excited, read about limitations:

  https://cloud.google.com/shell/docs/limitations

• by derefr on 1/27/18, 11:21 PM

  And if you'd rather use something on a higher level of abstraction, there's also Google Apps Script (https://www.google.com/script/start/)

  From one way of thinking, Apps Script is a lot like AWS Lambda; but from another way of thinking, Apps Script is more like OS automation workflows that happen to run in your cloud account rather than on your computer.

• by jwilk on 1/27/18, 9:48 PM

  It's available for to anyone that has a Google account.

  You don't have to be a "Gmail user".

• by decentrality on 1/27/18, 9:29 PM

  With my Google Chrome 64.0.3282.119 instance, there is no user selector it seems, which is causing authentication to fail, which then causes an infinitely repeating loop of reconnection attempts all leading to a 404 or 401 response in JSON.

• by emmelaich on 1/28/18, 1:33 AM

  Wow, even has dotnet. Including C#, F# and Visual Basic.

      $ find /opt/dotnet/ -name \*.sh
      /opt/dotnet/sdk/2.0.0/Roslyn/RunCsc.sh
      /opt/dotnet/sdk/2.0.0/Roslyn/RunVbc.sh
      /opt/dotnet/sdk/2.0.0/FSharp/RunFsc.sh
      ....

• by seoguru on 1/27/18, 11:44 PM

  This is nice. If we could ssh into it, it would be great! Is that feature coming soon?

• by mschuster91 on 1/28/18, 12:10 AM

  How does this work? Given that its PID1 is not a "real" init process but a bash running the script `/google/scripts/onrun.sh` and its / being type `aufs`, I guess this is a Debian Docker instance?

• by asadlionpk on 1/28/18, 5:03 AM

  This looks cool. I wonder how does the sandboxing work since it looks like docker but some things are different.

  I am curious because we made a somewhat similar tool for conducting interviews[1] but ours has collaboration too.

  [1] https://codepad.remoteinterview.io/

• by mikeymop on 1/29/18, 3:53 PM

  Wow, Debian 3.9 kernel.

  Has ssh, vim, tmux, and docker installed. I'm guessing this is either a container itself or a Debian vm.

  I'm still finding new things that are installed and useful. I would find myself using it to QA docker compositions I write. The question is can I host from this instance?

• by netrc on 1/28/18, 2:20 PM

  Would be great for your shell to automount your Google drive. (I know Google Drive isn't a real distributed file system, but the point stands... and if GDrive doesn't work, how about Google making an actual distributed/network file system that I can own for this purpose, like AWS EFS?)

• by supervillain on 1/28/18, 12:05 AM

  Interesting, upon 'ps aux', There's a 'sleep infinity' process running.

• by tritium on 1/27/18, 10:53 PM

  Does this have something specific to do with Gmail? Or is it just that it’s another thing (a separate, independent feature of your Google account) that you get for free, as part of being a Gmail user?

• by massimosgrelli on 1/28/18, 9:04 AM

  I run sudo npm install -g n and then sudo n8.9.4 but I got an error "sudo: n: command not found". How can I use n?

• by ryancnelson on 1/27/18, 11:20 PM

  is this down at the moment? (Sat Jan 27 23:18:48 UTC 2018) the ux seems to be hanging, trying to contact https://ssh.cloud.google.com ...

  "slashdotted?", or whatever the hackernews term for that is?

• by h43z on 1/28/18, 2:26 AM

  Interesting how they make use of tmux sessions for the cloud shell session feature.

• by ShabbosGoy on 1/28/18, 2:24 AM

  I setup an IPSec tunnel on it a while ago just to test , pretty neat IMO

• by Cyberis on 1/29/18, 2:38 AM

  Wow, I find GCP to be much less straightforward to use than AWS.

• by jacksmith21006 on 1/28/18, 3:00 PM

  This is pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.

• by wklm on 1/27/18, 10:08 PM

  can I ssh into it? does it have a public ip?

• by alexdong on 1/28/18, 12:27 AM

  Python 2.7 by default?

• by daurnimator on 1/28/18, 1:39 AM

  No Lua preinstalled

• by supervillain on 1/27/18, 11:59 PM

  No Ruby Pre-installed.

• by sneak on 1/27/18, 11:37 PM

  Last I looked, Cloud Shell was still pretty tiny instances, with no paid option for more (wth isn’t there a super boost mode that I pay for, at least?!), and the integrated editor was meh. I suppose I could use it with the gcloud CLI and docker-machine as a sort of orchestration console to bring up more boxes, but then I have to remember to kill them or I get a huge bill. (This has happened to me on DO before.)

  AWS Cloud9 lets me pay for a single big honkin ec2 that backs the IDE, has a better editor, browser ssh support—and has a built in option to suspend the “expensive” instance after 30 mins of inactivity.

  I loved Cloud Shell but the inability to let me pay for a bigger backing instance or more storage is a real limitation. (One of my commonly worked on projects takes 25 mins to compile on a boost mode Cloud Shell instance, and operates on ~80GiB of data.) Cloud9 is at a real advantage here.

  Whoever first integrates Atom, though (all of these seem to use Ace), I think will be the real winner.