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A lead cloud engineer uses Google Cloud Shell to perform administrative tasks, execute deployment scripts, and manage cloud resources using command-line tools. The engineer encounters a problem where custom system utilities installed via the Debian package manager are lost whenever the Cloud Shell session terminates due to 40 minutes of inactivity and a new virtual machine instance is provisioned.
The engineer has the following requirements:
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StudyCertsgcloud CLI preferences persist across sessions and apply to new terminal tabs.Which approach should the engineer implement?
Google Cloud Shell is an on-demand, Debian-based virtual machine pre-loaded with developer and administrative utilities such as the gcloud CLI, Terraform, and Docker. While the underlying VM instance is ephemeral and gets recycled after 40 minutes of inactivity or a maximum session length of 12 hours, Cloud Shell provides a 5 GB persistent disk storage volume mounted at $HOME that survives across instance restarts and terminations.
$HOME/.customize_environment instructs Cloud Shell to run package installation commands (such as apt-get update && apt-get -y install ) with root privileges in the background during instance startup. Because this script executes once when the VM boots, required Debian packages are automatically restored.$HOME/.bashrc persist between sessions on the home disk and are sourced every time a new interactive subshell or tab is launched.$HOME ensures they are saved to the persistent 5 GB disk storage rather than the ephemeral root filesystem.$HOME/.customize_environment script runs automatically on boot without requiring manual re-installation steps.$HOME/.bashrc ensures environment variables and gcloud property overrides propagate across all newly opened tabs.This solution leverages built-in Cloud Shell lifecycle hooks and persistent storage primitives. It solves the ephemeral filesystem limitation cleanly by isolating customizations to the persistent home directory and boot scripts.
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