I have two legacy servers in GCE, which have both been flagged as using the deprecated metadata server endpoints. At this moment in time, they have hundreds of GB's of data between them in MySQL and MongoDB data, and risking upgrading something on these boxes which has an adverse affect is not an option.
We are currently in the process of migrating away from the data stored here, but for now, we need to keep them running.
Is anyone aware of any implications to either
a) doing nothing or
b) Just setting the disable-legacy-endpoints metadata flag to true ?
i.e. Will these instances stop working altogether if we leave them as they currently are?
After some more digging into what was actually using the Metadata API to start with, we found that they were being sent by stackdriver_agent which was installed an extremely long time ago while it was free, and just never removed.
Stopping this agent will remove all calls that we make with these two legacy servers.
If you are considering disabling with the disable-legacy-endpoints metadata flag, make sure to test it in a contained environment first, i.e. a new VM from a snapshot of the affected instance, before apply to production services.
For help identifying the instances making the calls, refer to this article
For help identifying the processes within the instances, refer to this article