Datasources

Datasources are sources of configuration data for cloud-init that typically come from the user (i.e., user-data) or come from the cloud that created the configuration drive (i.e., meta-data). Typical user-data includes files, YAML, and shell scripts whereas typical meta-data includes server name, instance id, display name, and other cloud specific details.

Any meta-data processed by cloud-init’s datasources can be inspected. See Instance-data for more information.

How to configure which datasource to use

In most cases, users of cloud-init should not have to configure cloud-init to specify which datasource cloud-init is running on; cloud-init should be able to identify the platform.

There are exceptions, however, when the datasource does not identify itself to cloud-init. In this case, the datasource detection may be overridden by configuring a single datasource in the datasource_list or by using kernel command line arguments.

Datasources:

The following is a page for each supported datasource: