Capabilities

  • Setting a default locale
  • Setting a instance hostname
  • Generating instance ssh private keys
  • Adding ssh keys to a users .ssh/authorized_keys so they can log in
  • Setting up ephemeral mount points

User configurability

Cloud-init ‘s behavior can be configured via user-data.

User-data can be given by the user at instance launch time.

This is done via the --user-data or --user-data-file argument to ec2-run-instances for example.

  • Check your local clients documentation for how to provide a user-data string or user-data file for usage by cloud-init on instance creation.