Cloud shell is an interactive shell environment that allows you to manage your GCP resources programmatically, without having to install the Google Cloud SDK. Cloud shell comes readily configured with the gcloud command so you can easily manage your GCP resources. When you click on the cloud shell icon, GCP will deploy a temporary compute engine, g1-small virtual machine, with 5 GB of persistent disk storage. You will also see a command-line access to that instance pop up in the web browser.
These cloud shell virtual machine instances are provisioned per user and on a per-session basis. This instance terminates after one hour of inactivity or when you exit your session. The persistent disk, mounted as a $HOME directory, remains even after the cloud shell instance is destroyed. This $HOME directory is private to you.
Once this instance is fully deployed and initialized...