There are many things that devpod can do with virtual machines that are implicitly created for workspaces that use them ("machine" providers):

• list them (devpod machine list);
• start them (devpod machine start);
• stop them (devpod machine stop);
• delete them (devpod machine delete);
• retrieve their status (devpod machine status);
• ssh into them (devpod machine ssh);
• inspect devpod's idea of what some of the virtual machine's settings should be (devpod machine inspect).

There is one thing that is (arguably) missing: ability to retrieve description of what all of the virtual machine's settings actually are directly from the cloud provider.

For example, when using Google cloud this would be equivalent to gcloud compute instances describe; without such functionality in devpod, to obtain this information one has to resort to using cloud-specific tools.

I asked for this previously in the "original" devpod repository, and we got devpod machine inspect, but the functionality described above is still missing. Adding it will require modifications to devpod and all "machine" providers; I am thinking of taking care of the gcloud provider.

@skevetter, if you think it is a good idea to add this (one can argue that it is not: use platform-specific tools to retrieve platform-specific information), please share your thinking on where it should be added:

• as an option (full?) on devpod machine status;
• as an option (remote? raw?) on devpode machine inspect;
• as a separate command (devpod machine describe?);
• elsewhere ;)

Thank you!!