If you’re an IT administrator, you know that managing Operating System (OS) agents (Google calls them extensions) across a large fleet of VM instances can be complex and frustrating. Indeed, this operational overhead can be a major barrier to adopting extension-based services on VM fleets, despite the fact that they unlock powerful application-level capabilities.
To solve this problem, we’re excited to announce the preview of VM Extensions Manager, a new capability integrated directly into the Compute Engine API that simplifies installing and managing these Google-provided extensions.
VM Extensions Manager provides a centralized, policy-driven framework for managing the entire lifecycle of Google Cloud extensions on your VM instances. Instead of relying on manual scripts, startup scripts, or other bespoke solutions, you can now define a policy to ensure all your VM instances — both existing and new — conform to that state, reducing operational overhead from months to hours.
How to get started with VM Extensions Manager
VM Extensions Manager is integrated directly into the compute.googleapis.com API, meaning there are no new APIs to discover or enable. You can get started in minutes.
1. Define your extension policy
First, define a policy that specifies the desired state of your extensions.
For the preview, you can create zonal policies at the Project level. This policy targets VM instances within a single, specific zone.
Over the coming months, we’ll expand support to include global policies, as well as policies at the Organization and Folder levels. This will allow you to build a flexible hierarchy of policies (using priorities) to manage your extension on your enterprise fleet from a single control plane.
You can create this policy directly from the Google Cloud console:
Source Credit: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/introducing-vm-extensions-manager/
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