Cloud Workstations

Install and customize Cloud Workstations to use any combination of languages, libraries, or even code editors of your choice. You can even bring your own internal tools.

Supports third-party developer and DevOps tools such as GitLab and TeamCity. You can configure access to tools that are either external, self-hosted, on-premises, or even in other clouds. 

No infrastructure to manage. You create a workstation configuration for each of your teams, and Cloud Workstations provides on-demand development environments according to the templates you define.

Provides flexible and configurable machine types to help you size workstations to your needs, with configurable CPU, RAM, and storage settings.

Supports GPU platforms, including NVIDIA A100, T4, V100, P100, and P4 to accelerate machine learning and data processing tasks.

Cloud Workstations supports attaching a Persistent Disk to each workstation’s home folder, persisting data so you don’t need to keep your workstations running when not in use.

Set up inactivity timeouts to automatically shut down idle workstations and reduce unnecessary costs.

Cloud Workstations can run inside your VPC, allowing you to develop and run code inside your private network so you don’t need to emulate your services.

Define a security perimeter around your Cloud Workstations to constrain access to sensitive resources and mitigate data exfiltration risks.

For enhanced security, Cloud Workstations can be configured to limit access to only users with direct access to your private network.

Cloud Workstations follows the principle of least privilege, whereby default users only have access to the workstations they created. Administrators have the option to grant additional access levels as needed.

Context-based access policies and prevention of code exfiltration on download, copy, paste, print, and more.

Set up a maximum workstation session limit. This ensures that all developers use the latest version of your development environment updates and patches automatically when they log in.

All development environments in Cloud Workstations are defined as containers, which you can extend, modify, or even fully replace. This also gives you added flexibility to customize tools, libraries, IDE extensions, preloaded files, and start-up scripts.

Access Cloud Workstations through multiple different interfaces such as browsed IDEs, local IDEs, SSH tunnels, or even TCP tunnels, so you can develop from the interface that best suits your needs.

Use managed IDEs such as Code OSS for Cloud Workstations, or multiple JetBrains IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Rider, CLion. You can also use Posit Workbench (with RStudio Pro), or bring your own code editor for extra flexibility when defining your development workflow and tooling.

Quickly access any Cloud Workstations ports directly from your browser with built-in port forwarding, which IAM controls automatically enforce.

JetBrains IDE developers can access Cloud Workstations using JetBrains Gateway, so they can quickly start developing with their preferred IDE, while having a remote backend in the cloud.

Visual Studio Code developers can access Cloud Workstations using remote SSH, so they can use Visual Studio Code locally while having a remote backend in the cloud.

Cloud Workstations supports SSH access, tunneled over a WebSocket connection. All SSH access is subject to Google Cloud authorization and IAM permissions, so you don’t need to manage SSH keys or store them locally while ensuring access controls.