openstack team mailing list archive

[Scott Moser <smoser@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 24 Jul 2013, Jake G. wrote:

> I got the user correct now I am wondering why this is nessasary for my environment.
> I am not using Amazon EC2 services so why would I need to get metadata from there API?
>
> Can someone explain?

Cloud-init uses the "datasource" of the EC2 Metadata service, that
Openstack provides a workalike for.
That metadata service has things like "instance-id" and "hostname" that
are useful.  cloud-init uses instance-id for "run-once-per-instance"
functionality.

cloud-init also gets user-data from the datasource, and that is very
useful for initializing images with information provided at launch time by
the user.

If you enable config-drive in openstack, then cloud-init will find the
same data above from the config-drive, and wont bother looking for the ec2
metadata service.

Scott