Google Cloud Platform for Developers

Instance-specific metadata

While project-wide metadata is useful for providing configurations for entire fleets of VMs, its model is not ideal for information that should be private to a specific subset of instances. For such cases, instance-specific metadata can be used. The instance-specific metadata of one VM cannot be viewed from other instances, and external access to the metadata server API does not expose instance-specific metadata.

Instance-specific metadata is controlled using the gcloud compute instances command group. All instance-specific metadata is available using the following command:

gcloud compute instances describe <INSTANCE>