Stop a VM instance in GCP with local SSD attached to it

Question

According to the documentation - https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/#localssds - it is not possible to stop and instance that has a local SSD. It merely acts as a cache memory.

Is it possible to get a local SSD for an instance which is persistent and allows us to stop the instance?

Also, are local SSDs and persistent SSDs detected as different hardware types by an instance?

Answer 1

At this moment there's no way to setup a GCE instance with a local SSD and be able to stop it, as is mentioned in the documentation this kind of storage is used to store caches and as processing space.

Now, about the hardware differences between a local SSD and a persistent SSD. Since the point of view of the GCE instance they are the same, I mean the instance detects the two of them just as another mount; however, the technology that behind each of them it's completely different.

A local SSD, just as the documentation states, is physically attached to the server where is hosted the instance while a persistent SSD it's just a Log-Structured Volume, in other words it's not a physical hard drive.

There's a complete explanation about how persistent disks works on Google Cloud at [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA_A-OXsIss