Amazon EC2

The EC2 datasource is the oldest and most widely used datasource that cloud-init supports. This datasource interacts with a magic IP provided to the instance by the cloud provider (typically this IP is 169.254.169.254). At this IP a http server is provided to the instance so that the instance can make calls to get instance user data and instance metadata.

Metadata is accessible via the following URL:

GET http://169.254.169.254/2009-04-04/meta-data/
ami-id
ami-launch-index
ami-manifest-path
block-device-mapping/
hostname
instance-id
instance-type
local-hostname
local-ipv4
placement/
public-hostname
public-ipv4
public-keys/
reservation-id
security-groups

User data is accessible via the following URL:

GET http://169.254.169.254/2009-04-04/user-data
1234,fred,reboot,true | 4512,jimbo, | 173,,,

Note that there are multiple EC2 Metadata versions of this data provided to instances. Cloud-init attempts to use the most recent API version it supports in order to get the latest API features and instance-data. If a given API version is not exposed to the instance, those API features will be unavailable to the instance.

EC2 version	supported instance-data/feature
2021-03-23	Required for Instance tag support. This feature must be enabled individually on each instance. See the EC2 tags user guide.
2016-09-02	Required for secondary IP address support.
2009-04-04	Minimum supports EC2 API version for metadata and user data.

To see which versions are supported by your cloud provider use the following URL:

GET http://169.254.169.254/
1.0
2007-01-19
2007-03-01
2007-08-29
2007-10-10
2007-12-15
2008-02-01
2008-09-01
2009-04-04
...
latest

Configuration settings

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:

metadata_urls

This list of URLs will be searched for an EC2 metadata service. The first entry that successfully returns a 200 response for <url>/<version>/meta-data/instance-id will be selected.

Default: ['http://169.254.169.254', 'http://[fd00:ec2::254]', 'http://instance-data.:8773'].

max_wait

The maximum amount of clock time in seconds that should be spent searching metadata_urls. A value less than zero will result in only one request being made, to the first in the list.

Default: 120

timeout

The timeout value provided to urlopen for each individual http request. This is used both when selecting a metadata_url and when crawling the metadata service.

Default: 50

apply_full_imds_network_config

Boolean (default: True) to allow cloud-init to configure any secondary NICs and secondary IPs described by the metadata service. All network interfaces are configured with DHCP (v4) to obtain a primary IPv4 address and route. Interfaces which have a non-empty ipv6s list will also enable DHCPv6 to obtain a primary IPv6 address and route. The DHCP response (v4 and v6) return an IP that matches the first element of local-ipv4s and ipv6s lists respectively. All additional values (secondary addresses) in the static IP lists will be added to the interface.

An example configuration with the default values is provided below:

datasource:
  Ec2:
    metadata_urls: ["http://169.254.169.254:80", "http://instance-data:8773"]
    max_wait: 120
    timeout: 50
    apply_full_imds_network_config: true

Notes

• There are 2 types of EC2 instances, network-wise: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) ones and Classic ones (also known as non-VPC). One major difference between them is that Classic instances have their MAC address changed on stop/restart operations, so cloud-init will recreate the network config file for EC2 Classic instances every boot. On VPC instances this file is generated only on the first boot of the instance. The check for the instance type is performed by is_classic_instance() method.

• For EC2 instances with multiple network interfaces (NICs) attached, DHCP4 will be enabled to obtain the primary private IPv4 address of those NICs. Wherever DHCP4 or DHCP6 is enabled for a NIC, a DHCP route-metric will be added with the value of <device-number + 1> * 100 to ensure DHCP routes on the primary NIC are preferred to any secondary NICs. For example: the primary NIC will have a DHCP route-metric of 100, the next NIC will have 200.

• For EC2 instances with multiple NICs, policy-based routing will be configured on secondary NICs / secondary IPs to ensure outgoing packets are routed via the correct interface. This network configuration is only applied on distros using Netplan and at first boot only but it can be configured to be applied on every boot and when NICs are hotplugged, see Events and updates.