#4278 changed the hostname of the metadata service to be the FQDN. For whatever reason my companies internal dns resolvers actually return the the IP address of the metadata service.

From what I can gather the default timeout for HttpURLConnection[1] is forever which would explain why my service fails to startup when running locally.

This happens to me when running the latest google-cloud-core which is 1.6.0.

It seems like it would be a sane thing to add a timeout to the HTTP request. I can submit a PR to do this if others agree.

[1] https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-java/blob/master/google-cloud-clients/google-cloud-core/src/main/java/com/google/cloud/MetadataConfig.java#L73