GCE's counterpart doesn't seem to have a public endpoint and its functionality seems make sense: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/guest-agent
I have to say the problem is not oss, not agents, but Microsoft.
I have to say the problem is not oss, not agents, but Microsoft.
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.
EDIT: Looks like collectd and fluentd have been replaced by https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/ops-agent