The guest environment denotes the Google provided configuration and tooling inside of a Google Compute Engine (GCE) virtual machine. The metadata server is a communication channel for transferring information from a client into the guest. The guest environment includes a set of scripts and daemons (long running processes) that read the content of the metadata server to make a virtual machine run properly on our platform. You probably do not need this package unless you are running in a virtual machine on Google Compute Engine.