cloud-init

Cloud-init is the industry standard multi-distribution method for cross-platform cloud instance initialization. It is supported across all major public cloud providers, provisioning systems for private cloud infrastructure, and bare-metal installations.

Cloud instances are initialized from a disk image and instance data:

• Cloud metadata
• User data (optional)
• Vendor data (optional)

Cloud-init will identify the cloud it is running on during boot, read any provided metadata from the cloud and initialize the system accordingly. This may involve setting up network and storage devices to configuring SSH access key and many other aspects of a system. Later on cloud-init will also parse and process any optional user or vendor data that was passed to the instance.

Getting help

If you need support, start with the user documentation.

If you need additional help consider reaching out with one of the following options:

• Ask a question in the #cloud-init IRC channel on Libera
• Search the cloud-init mailing list archive
• Follow announcements or ask a question on the cloud-init Discourse forum
• Join the cloud-init mailing list and participate
• Find a bug? Report bugs on GitHub Issues

Distribution and cloud support

The majority of clouds and Linux / Unix OSes are supported by and ship with cloud-init. If your distribution or cloud is not supported, please get in contact with that distribution and send them our way!

To start developing cloud-init

Checkout the contributing document that outlines the steps necessary to develop, test, and submit code.

Daily builds

Daily builds are useful if you want to try the latest upstream code for the latest features or to verify bug fixes.

For Ubuntu, see the Daily PPAs

For CentOS, see the COPR build repos

Build / packaging

To see reference build/packaging implementations, refer to packages.