cloud-test: Google Cloud Shell will be free through 2016!

Google Cloud Platform Blog

Google Cloud Shell will be free through 2016!

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

In October, we announced the launch of Google Cloud Shell, a Google Cloud Platform feature that lets you manage your infrastructure and applications from the command line in any browser. At that time we committed that Cloud Shell beta would be free through 2015, and today we have extended this to the end of 2016!

With the holiday season upon us, you might not always have access to the computer you use to manage your application daily. With Cloud Shell, it just takes one click in the console to get temporary, quick access to a VM hosted and managed by Google that includes the most common tools needed to manage GCP pre-installed. If you need to store something between sessions, you’ll have 5GB of storage space.

Cloud Shell in GCP Cloud Console

We’ve seen strong enthusiasm around these new capabilities from the community:

“Cloud shell, the new UI, and the depth of each service and it’s documentation puts @googlecloud on top for me. Quality over quantity” - @SageProgramming

“Cloud shell + container engine from @googlecloud make quick work of configuring @kubernetesio projects. Nothing to install but a browser!” - @nissyen

But you also told us that a free beta period through the end of 2015 was too short. With that in mind, we’re excited to extend the free beta period for another year, until the end of 2016.

Here are just a few of the things you can try out in Cloud Shell during this period:

Build and deploy a NodeJs application

Create and manage Google Compute Engine instances

Manage Google Cloud Storage data

We hope you give it a try and welcome your feedback or interest in volunteering for a user experience research study, please email us at gcp-shell-feedback@google.com.