by A little time ago (more than 1 year ago) I began investigating cloud-init. I saw some redhat paper talking about cloud-init and it seemed to be really powerful simplifying massive vm deployments.
Someone close to me told me that: “don’t lose your time, we’ll use terraform/docker/k8s/whatever”
But the inception was already done, I read the documentation and started testing the technology.
What I’ve seen is that cloud-init is everywhere: I think that all linux “cloud” vm’s are using it. It’s really sturdily and simple, it does what it is supposed to do… That is part of its greatness and of its weakness.
The good part is well known: cloud-init service starts when the vm starts and does what you tell it to do through a YAML script: Installs software, create users, perform basic configs…
Its weakness is that cloud-init is a very simple software designed for the cloud, if your cloud architecture is not standard, you will have to make some tricks to bypass them.
For example, I was not using dhcp for VM’s networking and booting a VM with cloud-init without dhcp is really tricky… You can see a YAML script for static network here:
All that has given me a background and a global vision to understand the inner technology used on “cloud” platform (any cloud platform)… it seems that time has proved me right :-)