Only /home survives a session — everything else is rebuilt fresh
The ephemeral-image, persistent-home split makes every developer's tooling identical, auditable, and reproducible.
Speaker notes
- Cloud Workstations runs on ephemeral Compute Engine VMs with a persistent disk backing only /home — everything else comes from the workstation's container image and is rebuilt fresh every session start.
- Draw the direct parallel: this is the same trade-off as a stateless application container backed by a separate persistent volume — anything a developer needs to survive isn't in the image at all, and anything in the image is reproducible and identical for every engineer using it.
- State the best practice: build custom images from Google's own preconfigured base images, adding only the team's actual pinned toolchain on top, and scan the custom image with Artifact Analysis the same way application images are scanned — an unpatched workstation base image is as real a risk surface as an unpatched production container.
Deck map
01
One pipeline, built deliberately
02
PCDE sections 1-2, and where this course sits in the track
03
ACE operates a resource; PCDE designs the system
04
One tooling project, not one pipeline per environment
05
Dev, staging, and prod should never share one policy
06
What actually crosses the project boundary: a token, never a key
07
A hand-run command leaves no record of why
08
Local Terraform state is a production incident waiting to happen
09
Cloud Foundation Toolkit and Fabric FAST: forked, never left unmodified
10
Terraform for foundations, Config Connector for workload-coupled infra
11
Git decides, automation reconciles — no human runs apply
12
Cloud Build's whole job: source in, tested artifact out
13
Built-in substitutions are automatic; user-defined ones need an underscore
14
An unfiltered branch trigger is a budget incident waiting to happen
15
Three repository modes, and scanning stops at the virtual layer
16
Cheap checks first, expensive checks last
17
Cloud Build produces; Cloud Deploy promotes — never the reverse
18
Four objects: DeliveryPipeline, Target, Release, Rollout
19
Canary limits exposure; blue/green makes the cutover atomic
20
A human gates production; automation gates everything else
21
Meridian's full path: merge to production, one continuous record
22
Credentials go in Secret Manager; configuration goes in Parameter Manager
23
An ENV baked into a Dockerfile is still build-time injection
24
One question resolves almost every config-placement decision
25
Ephemeral environments need a TTL, or they're not actually ephemeral
26
Rapid, Regular, Stable — and a maintenance exclusion set too late doesn't help
27
A compromised pipeline is every environment it deploys to
28
SLSA grades the pipeline's trustworthiness, not any single artifact
29
Default-deny, or an unlisted cluster accepts anything
30
Only /home survives a session — everything else is rebuilt fresh
31
Every chapter of this course, in one sequence
32
Readiness checklist