There are two important things you want to do from the start:

• Accessing the instance
• Moving files between your instance and another machine. To do ssh into your instance, run:

$ gcloud compute ssh <instance_name>

In our case:

$ gcloud compute ssh sparrow

The first time you access your instance from your local system, the platform will propagate your keys to the instance, which may take a few minutes. Once connected, you can verify that your local public key (cat ~/.ssh/google_compute_engine.pub) is included in the list of authorized_keys on your instance (cat ~/.ssh/authorized_keys).