May be of some interest to some people - if you're currently signed in to a gmail (or gsuite) account Click Here to launch a Linux shell.

More information here: https://cloud.google.com/shell/

- Stuff stored in /home/ is persistent. You get 5gb of storage.
- Webapps served on port 8080 (and on experimentation other ports too) are able to be accessed by you for playing around with things.
- The machine is Debian 9.* based and has some reasonable specs. 
- You can get root access to your personal machine via "sudo -s" if required however bare in mind the machine will get reset after some time (I found after about an hour of not having a session open).

Some ideas on what to do with one:

1) Run the OpenVPN client for connecting to stuff within your house (via SSH / Mosh), store the keys in /home/ (aka, your Google account).
2) Run node.js, python, ruby apps, .net apps etc. These are all preinstalled.
3) Experiment around with Linux without any risk on breaking anything.

I thought it is quite neat and have a few uses for it and I am sure it is a great tool to learn Linux or coding without having to set up your own Linux host.