Google Compute Engine

The GCE datasource gets its data from the internal compute metadata server. Metadata can be queried at the URL ‘http://metadata.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/’ from within an instance. For more information see the GCE metadata docs.

Currently the default project and instance level metadatakeys keys project/attributes/sshKeys and instance/attributes/ssh-keys are merged to provide public-keys.

user-data and user-data-encoding can be provided to cloud-init by setting those custom metadata keys for an instance.

Configuration

The following configuration can be set for the datasource in system configuration (in /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg or /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/).

The settings that may be configured are:

• retries: The number of retries that should be done for an http request. This value is used only after metadata_url is selected. (default: 5)

• sec_between_retries: The amount of wait time between the retries when crawling the metadata service. (default: 1)

An example configuration with the default values is provided below:

datasource:
  GCE:
    retries: 5
    sec_between_retries: 1