Creating a guest policy

Use guest policies to maintain consistent software configurations across Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs).

To set up a guest policy on a set of VMs, complete the following steps:

Assign the required permissions to users.
Set up your VM.
Configure the guest policy JSON or YAML file.
Create the guest policy.

Before you begin

If you want to use the command-line examples in this guide:
1. Install or update to the latest version of the gcloud command-line tool.
2. Set a default region and zone.
If you want to use the API examples in this guide, set up API access.

Supported operating systems

For the full list of operating systems and versions that support OS configuration management (guest policies), see Operating system details.

Limitations

All instances targeted by a guest policy are updated each time the agent checks in with the service. This check happens every 10 to 15 minutes.
There are no compliance dashboards, notifications, or alerting services available with this beta. VMs that are not running the OS Config agent do not report failure. For best results, use this feature with the OS inventory management service or any other compliance monitoring tool.

Permissions

Because you can use guest policies to install and manage software packages on a VM, the creation and management of guest policies is equivalent to granting remote code execution access on a VM.

When you use guest policies, access is controlled using IAM permissions and is audit logged. However, the ability to execute code on the VM is still an option and can pose a potential security risk. To mitigate this, we recommend that you provide only the required access to each user.

Owners of a project have full access to create and manage policies. For all other users, you need to grant permissions. You can grant one of the following granular roles:

GuestPolicy Admin (roles/osconfig.guestPolicyAdmin). Contains permissions to create, delete, update, get, and list guest policies.
GuestPolicy Editor (roles/osconfig.guestPolicyEditor). Contains permissions to get, update, and list guest policies.
GuestPolicy Viewer (roles/osconfig.guestPolicyViewer). Contains permissions for read-only access to get and list guest policies.

For example, to grant a user admin access to guest policies, run the following command:

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding project-id \
    --member user:user-id@gmail.com \
    --role roles/osconfig.guestPolicyAdmin

Replace the following:

project-id: The project ID.
user-id: The user's Google Workspace username.

Setting up your VM

To use the OS configuration management service, you need to set up VM Manager.

Configuring a guest policy yaml or JSON file

You must provide guest policy specifications by using either a JSON or YAML file. To view sample configurations, see example guest policy YAML files.

The YAML or JSON file contains the following two main sections:

The assignment section which contains the list of target VMs.
The required configuration section contains the state that you want to maintain on the VMs.

Assignments

You can assign guest policies to all the VMs in your project or you can use the assignment key in your JSON or YAML file to target a specific group of VMs.

For example, you can target a group of VMs by using any of the following characteristics:

Instance name. See example 1.
Instance name prefix. See example 2.
Instance label. See example 3.
Zone. See example 4.
Operating system information, which contains OS name, version, and architecture. See example 5. The os-inventory describe command can be used to determine OS name, version, and architecture of VMs.

To assign a guest policy using operating system information, the OS Configuration agent must send operating system information to the guest attributes endpoint for the VM. To ensure privacy, by default, operating system information for VMs is unavailable. To group by operating system information, you must ensure that the guest attributes and OS Inventory Management services are enabled. To enable these services, see Setting up your VM.

Guest policy configurations are automatically applied to all new VMs that match the assignment.

Required configuration

The required configuration can be accomplished by using any or a combination of the following tasks:

Install, remove, and auto-update software packages. See example 1.
Configure software package repositories. See example 1 or example 3.
Install software using software recipes.
- For Linux VMs, see example 5.
- For Windows VMs, see example 4 or example 6.

Example guest policy YAML files

Example 1

Install a package my-package that must be kept up to date on the following VM instances: my-instance-1 and my-instance-2.

assignment:
  instances:
  - zones/us-east1-c/instances/my-instance-1
  - zones/us-east1-c/instances/my-instance-2
packages:
- name: "my-package"
  desiredState: UPDATED

For more information about assigning guest policies for packages, see the Package JSON representation reference document.

Example 2

Install the Cloud Monitoring agent, using the yum package manager, on all VM instances that have either of the following instance name prefix: test-instance- or dev-instance-.

assignment:
  instanceNamePrefixes:
  - "test-instance-"
  - "dev-instance-"
packages:
- name: "stackdriver-agent"
  desiredState: INSTALLED
  manager: YUM
packageRepositories:
- yum:
    id: google-cloud-monitoring
    displayName: "Google Cloud Monitoring Agent Repository"
    baseUrl: https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/repos/google-cloud-monitoring-el7-x86_64-all
    gpgKeys:
    - https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/yum-key.gpg
    - https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/rpm-package-key.gpg

For more information about assigning guest policies for pacakage repositories, see the PackageRepository JSON representation reference document.

Example 3

Install my-package and remove bad-package-1 and bad-package-2 from instances with a specific set of labels. Also add repositories for the apt and yum package managers.

assignment:
  # Assign to VM instances where `(label.color=red AND label.env=test) OR (label.color=blue AND label.env=test)`
  groupLabels:
  - labels:
      color: red
      env: test
  - labels:
      color: blue
      env: test
packages:
- name: "my-package"
  desiredState: INSTALLED
- name: "bad-package-1"
  desiredState: REMOVED
- name: "bad-package-2"
  desiredState: REMOVED
  manager: APT  # Only apply this to systems with APT.
packageRepositories:
- apt:  # Only apply this to systems with APT.
    uri: "https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt"
    archiveType: DEB
    distribution: cloud-sdk-stretch
    components:
    - main
- yum:  # Only apply this to systems with YUM.
    id: google-cloud-sdk
    displayName: "Google Cloud SDK"
    baseUrl: https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/repos/cloud-sdk-el7-x86_64
    gpgKeys:
    - https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/yum-key.gpg
    - https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/rpm-package-key.gpg

For more information about assigning guest policies for packages, see the Package JSON representation reference document.
For more information about assigning guest policies for pacakage repositories, see the PackageRepository JSON representation reference document.

Example 4

Installs software from an MSI hosted on Cloud Storage to all instances in us-east1-b and us-east1-d.

assignment:
  zones:
  - us-east1-b
  - us-east1-d
recipes:
- name: "swr-msi-gcs"
  desiredState: INSTALLED
  artifacts:
  - id: "the-msi"
    gcs:
      bucket: "my-bucket"
      object: "executable.msi"  # full URI gs://my-bucket/executable.msi#nnnnn
      generation: 1546030865175603
  installSteps:
  - msiInstallation:
      artifactId: "the-msi"

For more information about configuring recipe policies, see the SoftwareRecipe JSON representation reference document.

Example 5

Install software by running an inline script on all VM instances that meet the following requirements:

Operating system: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
Label: color=red

assignment:
  osTypes:
  - osShortName: rhel
    osVersion: "7"
  groupLabels:
  - labels:
      color: red
recipes:
- name: recipe-runscript
  desiredState: INSTALLED
  installSteps:
  - scriptRun:
      script: |-
        #!/bin/bash
        touch /TOUCH_FILE

For more information about configuring recipe policies, see the SoftwareRecipe JSON representation reference document.

Example 6

Installs application on all Windows instances using an executable installer that has the following instance name prefix: test-instance-.

assignment:
  instanceNamePrefixes:
  - "test-instance-"
  osTypes:
  - osShortName: WINDOWS
recipes:
- name: windows-install-exe-example
  desiredState: INSTALLED
  artifacts:
  - id: installer
    gcs:
      bucket: my-bucket
      generation: '1597013478912389'
      object: MyApp.Installer.x64.exe
  installSteps:
  - fileExec:
      artifactId: installer
      args:
      - /S # Installation must be silent

For more information about configuring recipe policies, see the SoftwareRecipe JSON representation reference document.