support cloudinit/instance metadata
Its very nice when launching a server to be able to customize it via the api at launch time. Various other cloud/hosting providers (aws, openstack, google, joyent, rackspc, etc) support the notion of passing in instance metadata when launching an instance via the api. On ubuntu this data typically gets interpreted via the cloud-init package which can perform all manner of useful customizations (ppas, ssh keys, package installs, chef/puppet/salt setup, etc). https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CloudInit. The two missing pieces are support in the api for instance metadata at launch, and installing the cloudinit package into the base image.
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Kapil Thangavelu
- Sep 11 2018
- Shipped
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Sep 11, 2018
Admin response
I'm excited to share that we've just announced the launch of our new metadata service which allows users to provide arbitrary user-data. In addition to that, cloudinit is now available on our Ubuntu 14.04 and CentOS 7 images. This allow scripts and cloud-config files to be run on first boot. For all the information, you can check out the blog post announcing the feature: https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/easily-automate-the-provisioning-of-your-droplets/ And this tutorial: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-droplet-metadata This opens up a lot of new possibilities for users to customize their droplets and build out their infrastructure. We hope you find it useful.
Related ideas
Would be great to see this implemented... it makes it very difficult for us to consider digital ocean without it :(
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Openstack, azure, aws, onapp, hp, IBM are all moving to build the cloudinit model into their public, private and hybrid cloud offering.
Scott Moser of canonical who develops cloudinit is adding a third metadata suite vendor-data to add to user-data and meta-data and the data sources are spiralling: http://cloudinit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/datasources.html
There is some configuration that only very early boothooks will solve.
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Better if accessible from the API
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Hi Moisey thanks for the update and glad to see it.
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Nice work Moisey, this would go a long way to build on top of DO's service.
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Fabbotastic Moisey.
Metadata service with cloudinit support really will make a difference.
Strongly suggest you work with Scott Moser to get DO user/meta/vendor DS Into the cloudinit package as other vendors have done.
please DON'T reinvent the wheel here, it'll make migration off other services *to* DO easier if you support standard tooling, formats and interfaces.
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I don't know if you're using libvirt, but in case you do, I have a github project for hosting a an EC2 like metadata service:
https://github.com/omribahumi/libvirt_metadata_api
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very nice
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