How can we improve Compute Engine?

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renaming vm

make it as easy as EC2 :)

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    Erik shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
    planned  ·  AdminPaul Nash (Product Manager, GCE, Google) responded  · 

    I won’t be drawn into an argument about hypothetically how trivial it is or isn’t; I appreciate that people here feel this is extremely simple to implement, but our engineers assure me it is not. The name propagates to many places, including the networking subsystem (for example). All of this has to be updated and tested carefully. Nonetheless, we are in fact working on it.

    For those that say “it’s #N in the list!” – that’s true. It’s that high because we’ve closed many other high ranking feature requests that users here have asked us for. Now this feature is near the top. We truly appreciate your feedback, and your patience, and are working hard every day to try and provide the best, most flexible platform that we can.

    Show previous admin responses (2)

    46 comments

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      • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

        can't you just have each vm have an internal id that never changes, and the name would link back to it? that seems trivial

      • Jules Lefevre commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

        Paul, we appreciate the new update - to learn this is not an easy implementation is news, prior to this support had only agreed with us that "it does seem trivial" - leaving a lot to be wondered.

        Looking forward to further updates.

      • Jules Lefevre commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

        @Steve Larson, sadly mate snapshotting does not retain metadata etc. All of this information does have to be re-entered manually.

      • Jules Lefevre commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

        4 years onwards and... Seriously, nothing.

        I genuinely was astounted when I found there was not a way to rename VM's back in 2014. It's easy to say "Yes, you're right, it's trivial", but truly Paul, this is so far beyond "Trivial" that it's actually embarrassing to admit to my AWS supporter friends that "Yes you STILL can't rename VM's in GCP".

        I can't believe this has gone this long without it's due attention. It's the 4th highest requested feature currently on GCE, and let's be honest, an intern with a day's free time could have had this solved all too long ago.

        At the end of the day, if it takes 4 years to fix something "trivial" then perhaps the method in which issues are deemed worthy of fixing should be "fixed".

      • William Barath commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

        This is taking a bizarre amount of time. The compute instance has a numerical unique ID. Everything should index by that, and then changing the name is just a trivial change to metadata. It's not like the name is actually being used for anything intelligent like ... oh... updating the /etc/hosts in the cloud shell ... so what exactly is the holdup?

      • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

        It's necessary, please update this feature, always starts as a prototype that grow and become a real vm.

      • Steve Larsen commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

        I realise not being able to rename a vm can be an annoyance, but it doesn't seem to be that critical given you can create labels for instances and leverage these values in the names you'd want to refer to an instance for operational purposes. Also, as an option to renaming I'm sure that if you snapshot the instance and start it up again you can name it whatever you want then. Two suitable workarounds to the inability to actually just rename the VM I think.

      • Arun Rao commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

        When we are dealing with dozens of VMs (which most Production systems have these days) we need to change things for management purposes from time to time... without the ability to do that, operations teams have to maintain a separate list of things offline... in Google Sheets!

        What's the status of this request?

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