We're using Managed VMs, and can currently serve files from the local disk in the VM (which is a standard magnetic HD), as well as serving from Google Cloud Storage (which is also backed by magnetic HDs). https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/
As we're working with large files (high-res geo images) in a latency-sensitive context, we'd like to be able to use Local SSDs with our Managed VMs app (it's okay that the data is not persistent, it just needs to be fast and work with large files). At some point, we may want to use other services that are fast and designed for working with large files (e.g. Blobstore?), but we have a workflow already set up to work with files so it should be easiest to set up a faster file system now. Is it possible to use Local SSD storage with Managed VMs?
Here's info on Local SSDs. They need to be created at instance creation time (for Google Compute instances, which Managed VMs are creating behind the scenes). It looks like Local SSDs can be created via command line, gcloud compute, or an API, but it's not clear where we'd configure any of these things since Managed VMs is doing the instance creation for us. Presumably we'd do this in app.yaml, Dockerfile, or in a gcloud command, but it's not obvious how this would work. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/local-ssd
Apologies, this isn't currently available. We don't really let you customize the VM specs, aside from the disk size. If you max out the disk size, you will get the highest IOPS we support. We kicked around the idea of tmpfs, but it's not available just yet.