Include cloud-init in images

[JedMeister]

As per inquiry by exoscale - cloud-init could be a good addition to TKL images (more info on exoscale blog post).

It is available in wheezy-backports

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[JedMeister]

I imagine that this could meld quite nicely with TKL inithooks (although I'm only guessing... I don't know enough about it all to be sure...)

[lirazsiri]

Supporting cloud-init looks like a good move. There's some overlap with inithooks which would need to be taken care of and tested. I say we look into this for 14.0. The main benefit is that it would make deployment of the images on other platforms that much more practical which should be a win for hosting providers / private clouds. Our current inithooks solution is AWS/Hub specific (processing the userdata).

[a3s7p]

@JedMeister, are we looking at this for 14.1?

[JedMeister]

TBH I'm not sure why we didn't do it for v14.0 but I recall there was a reason. Maybe it was just that we decided to postpone so we could do some testing to ensure that there is no negative interplay between InitHooks and CloudInit?

My thought is that if you are out of things to do and want something to look at; then please feel free to start having a look at this. As mentioned above the main issue is potential overlap with inithooks and how that may be problematic...

[JedMeister]

As a bit of explanation to the repinning of this issue to v14.2:

I had a bit of a chat to Alon about this and basically it'd be nice to include; but as there is overlap between cloud-init and inithooks, this isn't a simple "add it to the plan" type scenario (as I sort of had in my head).

We'll need to actually put a bit of effort into trying to integrate the 2 systems. We'll want current inithooks usage to remain unchanged (so current users don't have to retool); although it would be good to allow cloud-init to support more of inithooks functionality.