Professional Cloud Architect – Google Cloud Certification Guide

Metadata

Adding metadata to your GCE instance allows for future queries to pull information about the instance. Metadata is stored on a metadata server and can be queried from the Compute Engine API or from the instance itself. We can pull information such as hostname, instance ID, or any custom metadata we apply. We can also provide configuration information to applications using metadata, which will negate the need to store this data in the application itself.

We also use metadata to reference the startup script to be executed during our instance deployment. Let's assume we host our startup script called startup.sh on a Cloud Storage bucket called deployments. To ensure it is executed, we need to add the path to our bucket and the startup ...