Please ignore (created by mistake)

[dlipovetsky]

What happened:

I used https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/image-builder/ to create an Ubuntu 20.04 AMI with the latest available cloud-init package, 23.3.3. The machine fails to join the cluster.

What you expected to happen:

The machine should join the cluster.

How to reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible):

Use image-builder to create an AMI, then use the AMI to create a cluster.

Anything else we need to know?:

In https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-aws/pull/1490, CAPA began writing sensitive user-data to AWS Secrets Manager (https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-aws/pull/1924 added support for an alternative, the SSM Parameter Store). CAPA replaced the user-data produced by CABPK with a mechanism to fetch the user-data from the service. This mechanism relied on an "include" that would, by design, fail the first time cloud-init ran. CAPA relied on cloud-init ignoring the failure.

As of https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/pull/367, cloud-init stopped ignoring the failure by default, but introduced a feature flag that allowed cloud-init to ignore the failure, as it had in the past. The default settings caused the cloud-init boot to fail, and https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/image-builder/pull/406 used the feature flag as a work around.

More recently, as of https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/pull/4228, the feature flag itself was removed. Without the feature flag, the existing workaround has no effect, and cloud-init boot fails.

@supershal and I looked into this issue, and filed https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/image-builder/issues/1333. We finally understand the root cause.

The most CAPA-maintained AMIs were created with cloud-init 22.4.2, instead of the default cloud-init version.

Environment: n/a

/kind bug

[dlipovetsky]

/triage accepted /priority important-soon

[dlipovetsky]

/assign @dlipovetsky

[dlipovetsky]

So sorry, I opened this against the wrong repository :disappointed: