[Google Compute Engine] Update regarding the rollout schedule of changes to labels

[Google Compute Team]

This message is an update regarding changes to labels and tags that will be rolling out starting on April 26, 2017. This change will impact how labels and tags could be used to configure networking settings.

Google Compute Engine provides two types of customer-defined resources for instances:

1. Tags are user-defined strings that can be set to enable network settings or as metadata for instances only.

2. Labels are also user-defined strings (in key-value format), except that they also apply to multiple resources across Google Compute Engine including instances, disks, images and snapshots. Labels are also propagated through the billing data.

Why are we making these changes?

Labels have been designed as a way to organize resources across Google Cloud Platform while tags are primarily intended to configure networking on instances (e.g. enabling firewall rules). For this reason, we’re separating these two use-cases by stopping the propagation of keys from labels to tags.

What is changing and when will it take effect?

Starting April 26, 2017, we will start rolling out a change on how labels integrate with tags in the following ways:

1. Compute Engine will no longer automatically sync labels and tags.

2. New tags will no longer create new labels with the string as the key of the Label and vice-versa.

For example, if you previously set a tag “webserver” to your instance, it would also create a label with { “webserver” : ”” }.

After these updates, when you create a tag “webserver,” it won’t propagate any key or value to labels and vice-versa.

Sincerely,

The Google Cloud Platform Team