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 is persisted as
/run/cloud-init/instance-data.json. Cloud-init provides tooling to
quickly introspect some of that data. See Instance-data for more
information.
How to configure which datasource to use¶
By default cloud-init should automatically determine which datasource it is
running on. Therefore, 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 “figure it out”.
There are exceptions, however, when the datasource does not
identify itself to cloud-init. For these
exceptions, one can override datasource detection either by configuring a
single datasource in the datasource_list,
or by using kernel command line arguments.
Datasources:¶
The following is a list of documentation for each supported datasource: