Google Cloud Shell won't start; throws usage limits exceeded msg

Question

This is a Google Cloud Storage service related question; specifically about Google Cloud Shell and inability to start it. It worked fine for the past week. But today, about 3 hours earlier onward, when I visit:

https://console.cloud.google.com/storage

...and click on Products & Services (the side-drawer menu, top left corner), and then choose Storage (under STORAGE services), and then click on Activate Google Cloud Shell, it says:

Connecting: Provisioning your Google Cloud Shell machine...

...and then the following message:

Service usage limits temporarily exceeded. Try connecting later. If you believe this is an error, please report via feedback. Close

Screenshot here

The message clearly says limits exceeded... But all I've been doing is:

gsutil -lhr gs://some-bucket/my-dir/** | tail -10

and

watch -n 25 'gsutil -lhr gs://some-bucket/my-dir/** | tail -10'

I let the watch command running (BTW: does this operation incur a cost?).

I am uploading about 205 GBs of podcast archives (MP3s) that I need to hold onto for my research. So far I've transferred 89.9 GBs of data using:

gsutil -m cp -r my-dir gs://some-bucket

...from my laptop (sadly, Win 10 Pro for the moment). I don't have access to a Linux box to get a simple, clean listing with human-readable file sizes and summary, the last few lines, tail -10 i.e. (to keep an eye on progress of uploads, nor does gsutil cp provide any).

Trying to do the same on my Windows laptop involves some trashy PowerShell BS which I have no inclination in spending time on! :(

But now I can't start a Google Cloud Shell, which indeed was a great convenience...

I checked billing and see this:

Cloud Storage Durable Reduced Availability Storage: 2.541 Gibibyte-months (Source:some-bucket), US$ 0.05 debited

and

Cloud Storage Class A Request: 13998 Counts (Source:some-bucket), US$ 0.14 debited.

That's fine with me, as I am OK to pay for the storage I use and the operations I make.

Any tips on why cloud shell access won't start and give that limit-exceeded message?

Answer 1

I had a similar issue with with firefox where it hangs with 'Provisioning your Google Cloud Shell machine...'

Switched to google chrome and it got resolved.

Answer 2

I had same issue, the shell takes forever and stuck there. I simply clicked '+' (open a new tab).

A few seconds later, problems solved!

Answer 3

This has been resolved for me by Google; I had Cloud Shell sessions open for prolonged periods of time and had exceeded some fair-use limits set for it.

Anyone facing a lockout like this, please be sure to provide feedback as suggested by Alexey above.

Thanks once again, Alexey, for resetting the counters and re-enabling the console access...