Google Compute Engine SSH Tunnel

TLDR

You can create a ssh tunnel from your virtual machine to your local machine by running the following command on your local machine:

$ gcloud compute ssh <INSTANCE-NAME> -- \
  -N -L <LOCAL-PORT>:localhost:<REMOTE-PORT>

Example

For example, if you are training a neural network using tensorflow on your virtual machine named instance-1. To monitor the training, you would launch tensorboard on the remote machine:

$ tensorboard --logdir=log

However tensorboard would only start on localhost:6006 and your virtual machine is usually not configured to open this port on the internet. To access this port as if the tensorboard was running on your machine you would run on your local machine:

$ gcloud compute ssh instance-1 -- -N -L 8080:localhost:6006

You could finally open localhost:8080 in a browser on your local machine and the tensorboard interface would show up.