First, it is not recommended to upgrade the OS in place. Instead you should deploy the application on an image of the next version.
Also, this question is now one year old. Debian 7 Wheezy is not supported anymore.
I was able to upgrade Debian 7 to Debian 8 Jessie in Compute Engine. I just replaced "wheezy" with "jessie" in /etc/apt/source.list and /etc/apt/source.list.d/* and then ran a "apt-get dist-upgrade".
See the Debian Jessie upgrading documentation for all about upgrading from 7 to 8. https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html.
I tried with both:
The latest standard Debian 7 image "debian-7-wheezy-v20160531". It's still available but deprecated.
It appears to work. If you try on one of your projects be careful: the image is 1.5 years old and hasn't received security updates.
A new image built from https://github.com/andsens/bootstrap-vz/blob/master/manifests/official/gce/deprecated/wheezy-backports.yml.
It works mostly, what I noticed is that /etc/hosts file is missing the name of the machine, and the hostname defaults to "localhost". I am not sure why but that still does not break ssh.
Regarding the sshd error:
instance-1 sshd[18651]: Connection closed by XX.XXX.XX.XX [preauth]
It means that the ssh client closed the connection during the SSH preauthentication phase.
It often means that the the sshd daemon can't read the user's ~/.ssh/* files. The error messages above this line could bring more information, you can also try adding "-vv" to the ssh command.
If you still have the issue, I suggest you follow the "Troubleshooting SSH errors
" part of the troubleshooting guide https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/troubleshooting#ssherrors.