google-cloud-platformgoogle-cloud-shellgcsfuse

Can I use Cloud Shell with more than the 5 GB persistent storage?

According to the docs:

Cloud Shell provisions 5 GB of free persistent disk storage mounted as your $HOME directory on the virtual machine instance.

I would need more (paid) storage though that I can access from the Cloud Shell environment and that is persistent across my sessions. It's mostly used to store local clones of git repositories and images. I would be the only one to access these files.

It seems that the 5 GB storage is a hard limit, so it won't expand dynamically and bill me for the exceeding amount. It is possible to use Boost Mode, but that does not affect the storage size. And I also can't provision more storage with a custom Cloud Shell environment. I couldn't figure out if I can mount another GCE persistent disk to my $HOME. I was considering gcs-fuse as suggested in this answer but I'm not sure if it is suitable for git repos.

Is there any way to have more storage available in Cloud Shell?

Solution

  • Google Cloud Shell is a container that runs on a hidden Compute Engine instance managed by Google. You can download, modify and redeploy this container to Cloud Shell or to your own container running in the cloud or on your desktop.

    The base image of the container is available at gcr.io/cloudshell-images/cloudshell:latest, per this page.

    For your use case, I would use Compute Engine with Container OS and run the Cloud Shell container within COS. You can scale the CPUs, memory, and storage to fit your requirements.

    You can also set up a Compute Engine instance, install the CLIs, SDKs, and tools and have a more powerful system.

    Notes for future readers based upon the first answer:

    1. Filestore is a great product, but pay attention to costs. The minimum deployment is 1 TB at $200+ per month. You will need to mount the NFS share each time Cloud Shell restarts - this can be put into login scripts. Note: I am not sure if you can actually mount an NFS share from Filestore in Cloud Shell. I have never tested this.
    2. You will have the same remount problem with FUSE, plus you will have bandwidth costs to access Cloud Storage.
    3. Cloud Shell is a great product that is well implemented, but when you need to exceed its capabilities it is better to deploy a small/medium size GCE instance. this enables persistent, snapshots, etc.