Deploy on GCP

GCP is the recommended cloud for PandaStack. n2d-highcpu instances expose nested KVM with zero quota requests, and boot times are 250–300 ms (the same as bare metal).

Prereqs

• gcloud CLI logged in (gcloud auth login)
• A billing account
• The compute and iam APIs enabled

One-command deploy

git clone https://github.com/pandastack/pandastack
cd pandastack
./deploy/deploy-gcp.sh

The script will:

1. Create a project (or reuse one set in GCP_PROJECT)
2. Create a VPC + firewall rules
3. Provision a n2d-highcpu-32 VM in us-central1-a (Ubuntu 24.04)
4. Run cloud-init to install Firecracker, mount the XFS-reflink loopback, lay down damroo-agent, damroo-api, damroo-dashboard, and Caddy
5. Bake the default templates (code-interpreter, node-js, python-data, …)
6. Issue Let's Encrypt certs for *.pandastack.ai (or your custom domain)

Total time: ~12 minutes.

Costs

For dev/staging, run --machine-type n2d-highcpu-8 (~$135/month, supports ~30 concurrent sandboxes).

Customizations

GCP_REGION=europe-west4 \
GCP_MACHINE=n2d-highcpu-64 \
PANDASTACK_DOMAIN=pandastack.acme.com \
./deploy/deploy-gcp.sh

Tearing down

./deploy/deploy-gcp.sh --destroy

This deletes the VM and zone — cert state in CF is preserved.