Google has been making so many cloud (platform) related announcements lately!

I love their service & it makes me happy to see them ramp up their efforts to provide an even better experience & product line.

Only to take it away after a couple years. I'm avoiding Google services for a while or indef.

Would you mind listing the Google Cloud Platform services that have been "taken away"? I'm honestly curious to know if the decision of shutting down services such as Reader impacts your perception towards Google's Cloud offerings.

Disclaimer: I work at Google.

Just because one hasn't been taken away yet doesn't mean it won't happen. Obviously Google has a bad track record regarding product lifetime and it's going to take some extra special care to win many people back.

I was just explaining to a colleague the best ways to get acces to shell utilities like awk/sed, as a Windows user. In the balance of ease of setup vs functionality I had recommended the git bash application. This looks even better (for 2016).

In addition to all the other stuff, there is also MSYS2 [1] which includes pacman (the package manager from Arch ported over) and a decent sized package repository.

[1] https://msys2.github.io/

I'm a big fan of Babun; http://babun.github.io/

If all one wants out of Zsh are the smart tab completions then msys2 is lighter weight alternative. I have found babun a bit laggy.

on windows also check out this: https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow

git bash + gow + conemu makes windows not so bad.

If you want a remote unix toolchain in a browser, http://c9.io is a cloud IDE with a browser interface that includes shell access.

It's a full Ubuntu environment running in a Docker container on their servers.

Their free tier is more than enough for playing with the shell.

Can someone clear up two questions for those of us more familiar with EC2:

Does "temporary" instance imply volatility or limited uptime?

Web preview sounds like I might be able to run cron jobs or small web apps just for myself with SSL included. Does this seem plausible?

It says: "The virtual machine instance that backs your Cloud Shell session is not permanently allocated to a Cloud Shell session and terminates if the session is inactive for an hour. After the instance is terminated, any modifications that you made to it outside your $HOME are lost."

Does anyone known if the docker image for Cloud Shell is open source (or parts of it?)

I don't see docker mentioned. What makes you ask?

Edit: Sorry for causing some confusion about if this is using docker or not. There is no reference to docker in the docs.

Would you be so nice to share the information you got?