Google Cloud Workstations is GCP's Cloud Development Environment (CDE) offering. It offers fully managed containerized development environments that are accessible through SSH, HTTPS, VSCode and Jetbrains IDEs among others, giving developers the illusion of connecting to a local environment. Google Cloud Workstations allows administrators to make the containerized development environments part of a private network and to be either publicly or privately accessible. This ability to tweak networking configurations, along with support to create the environments with either custom or predefined images, makes Google Cloud Workstations, in our view, worth assessing for organizations looking for a secure CDE solution within their own GCP perimeter. If you're considering Google Cloud Workstations, we recommend that you test your networking configuration before rolling it out widely, as high latency can become a real friction to the developer experience of these containers.
