Cloud Workstations manages Google Cloud resources, such as Compute Engine VMs and persistent disks (PDs), to give you more visibility and control over your projects' resources. For example, you can set up scheduled disk snapshot policies that enforce backup policies for all workstations PDs. Similarly, having VMs inside your project lets you seamlessly access and manage resources in your VPC network.
The following diagram illustrates the architecture of Cloud Workstations.
Workstation cluster
A workstation cluster contains and manages a collection of workstations in a single cloud region and VPC network inside your project. Each workstation cluster includes two components that are managed by Google Cloud: a controller and a gateway.
Controller: manages the lifecycle of VM instances and other workstation resources inside of your project.
The controllers use the Compute Engine API to manage the lifecycle of the resources, and utilize Private Service Connect to route traffic to the workstations' VMs.
Gateway: receives traffic from clients bound for particular workstations, and forwards traffic to the appropriate VM instance. Each workstation cluster has a unique domain name, and each workstation can be reached at a subdomain of the workstation cluster's domain—for example,
$WORKSTATION_ID.$CLUSTER_ID.cloudworkstations.dev.
Other features of workstation clusters are as follows:
Administrators and platform teams create workstation clusters, which define a group of workstations in a particular region and the VPC network that they're attached to.
Workstation clusters aren't related to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters.
Each workstation cluster has a dedicated controller that is connected to a VPC within which workstations reside with Private Service Connect (and this has no impact on VPC peering limits). This controller manages the workstations resources throughout their lifecycle and provides network egress and ingress to the workstations through a public cluster gateway.
Each cloud region requires at least one workstation cluster.
If necessary, it is also possible to enable a fully private gateway, so that only endpoints inside your private network have access to Cloud Workstations.
VPC network
When creating a workstation cluster, you specify a project and a VPC network to host the resources. Cloud Workstations then provisions the following resources in your project:
Private Service Connect: establishes a connection between the Cloud Workstations controller and your VPC, enabling the creation of resources inside your project.
VM instance: a Compute Engine VM is dynamically created inside your project and VPC after a workstation is started. This VM is automatically deleted at the end of a user session or after a configurable session timeout.
VM Gateway: pulls client traffic from the workstation cluster gateway, authenticates and authorizes it, and forwards it to the container.
Container: defines the tools pre-installed in a workstation, such as the IDE or code editor, and any other programs or settings as specified by the workstation configuration.
Cloud Workstations provides a number of base images preconfigured with popular IDEs and language tooling. Additionally, administrators and platform teams can customize their environments by creating and specifying custom container images that contain the tools necessary to meet their developers' needs. These container images can extend the Cloud Workstations base image or can be new, custom Linux container images created by the platform team.
Persistent Disk: a persistent disk attached to the workstation VM mounted to the
/homefolder, allowing for data and files to be stored after the session ends.
Resource lifecycle
Cloud Workstations manages VMs, container images and persistent disks for use as the runtime environment for each workstation. Configure the specifications for these resources in your workstation configuration.
When a workstation is started, Cloud Workstations does the following:
- Creates a VM.
- Pulls the workstation container image onto the VM.
- The first time the workstation is started, creates a persistent disk
to act as the workstation's
/homedirectory. - Attaches the persistent disk to the VM.
- Starts the container on the VM and mounts the persistent disk to the
/homedirectory in the container.
When the session ends, Cloud Workstations deletes the VM but detaches and retains the persistent disk so that it can be used in future workstation sessions. The workstations service retains the disk until the workstation is deleted, at which point the persistent disk is also deleted—unless it is optionally configured to be retained.
Resource pooling
Administrators and platform teams can optionally pool VMs and persistent disks for faster workstation startup using the pool size workstation configuration option. When specified, the service pools the specified number of persistent disks and VMs and pre-pulls the container image onto the VM before workstation assignment. Unassigned VMs and disks in the pool are automatically deleted and recreated every 12 hours. This enables faster workstation startup times by removing the wait time for creating VMs and pulling the container image onto the VM.
When pooling is enabled, Cloud Workstations does the following when starting a workstation:
- Selects a VM from the pool that has the container image pre-pulled.
- The first time the workstation is started, selects a persistent disk from the pool.
- Attaches the persistent disk to the VM.
- Starts the container image on the VM and mounts the persistent disk to the
/homedirectory in the container image. - Refills the pool by creating a new VM and persistent disk to replace those that were assigned.
When the session ends, Cloud Workstations deletes the VM but detaches and retains the persistent disk so that it can be used in future workstation sessions. The workstations service retains the disk until the workstation is deleted, at which point the persistent disk is also deleted—unless it is optionally configured to be retained.
Container image updates
Because the workstation container image is pre-pulled onto the pooled VMs, updates to the container image made in the remote image repository with the same image tag are not picked up until all the pooled VMs have been assigned or deleted after 12 hours. At that point, new VMs are created to replenish the pool and pull the updated container image.
To force a pool refresh to pick up the container image updates immediately,
administrators can set the pool_size to 0, and then set it back to the
preferred pool_size. From the Google Cloud console, Disable the
Quick start workstations feature in the workstation configuration, save the
configuration, set it back to the preferred number, and then save again.
Alternatively, administrators and platform teams can update the image tag in the
container.image
field in the workstation configuration, which forces a refresh of the pool to
pick up the new container image tag.
Reduce workstation startup time with Image streaming
Cloud Workstations supports Image streaming, which provides faster workstation startup time by reducing the workstation container image pull time.
Image streaming in Cloud Workstations typically reduces container image pull time from minutes to seconds, and workstation containers usually start running without waiting for the entire image to download.
Requirements
You must meet the following requirements to use Image streaming in Cloud Workstations:
You must enable the Container File System API in workstations host project.
Enable the Container File System API
Alternatively, you can run the following
gcloudCLI command to enable the Container File System API in workstations host project:gcloud services enable containerfilesystem.googleapis.com
Your container images must be stored in Artifact Registry.
You must specify a service account for use in your workstation configuration.
If your cluster is inside a VPC Service Controls perimeter, you must add an egress rule allowing your service account to access the Container File System API on the project hosting your container image. If you are using a preconfigured IDE, you must add the
cloud-workstations-imagesproject (project number662288601415) to the allowlist.
Limitations
You might not notice the benefits of Image streaming during the first pull of an eligible image. However, after Image streaming caches the image, future image pulls on a workstation benefit from Image streaming.
Other GKE Image streaming Limitations apply.