guest-agent VS WALinuxAgent

Compare guest-agent vs WALinuxAgent and see what are their differences.

WALinuxAgent

Microsoft Azure Linux Guest Agent (by Azure)
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guest-agent WALinuxAgent
2 2
112 519
8.1% 0.8%
9.0 2.2
3 days ago about 21 hours ago
Go Python
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

guest-agent

Posts with mentions or reviews of guest-agent. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-09-14.

WALinuxAgent

Posts with mentions or reviews of WALinuxAgent. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-09-14.
  • "Secret" Agent Exposes Azure Customers to Unauthorized Code Execution
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Sep 2021
    https://github.com/Azure/WALinuxAgent - I think this is the equivalence of GCP guest-agent, serving similar functionalities, and is pre-installed on all official images, otherwise basic things like authentication and image baking will break.

    By setting the provisionVMAgent property to false when creating a virtual machine, WALinuxAgent should run with all extensions disabled, and I think that's as minimal as a Linux VM can go on Azure.

    This property, however, can't be set via https://github.com/ansible-collections/azure, which is of course another lovely OSS project by Microsoft. I didn't bother to send a PR.

    The OMI agent seems to be a different beast that is way more obnoxious. The closest thing on GCP is probably the collectd agent and the fluentd agent installed for Stackdriver Monitoring and Stackdriver Logging? Plus whatever OS config to enable unattended upgrades.

    I just learnt from this HN thread about the SSM agent on AWS. That one does seem equally obnoxious as the OMI agent.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing guest-agent and WALinuxAgent you can also consider the following projects:

azure - Development area for Azure Collections

omi - Open Management Infrastructure

compute-image-packages - Packages for Google Compute Engine Linux images.