Launch a local instance with cloud-init

It’s very likely that you will want to test your cloud-init configuration locally before deploying it to the cloud.

Fortunately, there are several different virtual machine (VM) and container tools ideal for this sort of local testing.

Due to differences across platforms, initializing and launching instances with cloud-init can vary. Here we present instructions for various platforms, or links to instructions where platforms have provided their preferred methods for using cloud-init.