I was working on my GCP to build a container and installing some apps. After some time, my Cloud Shell got hung, i refreshed the web page, after that I noticed all my containers and images are gone. And checking the uptime, it’s clear that the OS was re-provisioned. But shouldn’t my GCP instance (I believe should be a VM) be always on? Also, seems the IP address also have changed.

before:

cloudshell:~$ docker pull rockylinux:8
8: Pulling from library/rockylinux
9088cdb84e39: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:9794037624aaa6212aeada1d28861ef5e0a935adaf93e4ef79837119f2a2d04c
Status: Downloaded newer image for rockylinux:8
docker.io/library/rockylinux:8

cloudshell:~$ docker images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
rockylinux 8 c79048e50f5f 6 months ago 198MB

cloudshell:~$ date
Thu Jun 6 03:27:28 PM UTC 2024

after some time:

cloudshell:~$ docker images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE

cloudshell:~$ docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES

cloudshell:~$ uptime
16:57:49 up 10 min, 0 users, load average: 0.10, 0.04, 0.01

I looked to another Stackoverflow post and it says it should be always on:

/questions/42597680/google-compute-engine-always-running#:~:text=Yes%20it%20is%2C%20VM%20instance,%2Fcompute%2Fdocs%2Fshutdownscript.