[ Thanks to The
VAR Guy for this link. ]
“Like many things cloud-related, cloud-init — which the
Ubuntu wiki describes as a package “that handles early
initialization of a cloud instance” — can be difficult to
define in precise terms. Put simply, though, the software is a tool
for automatically performing different tasks when a cloud image is
booted for the first time. It supports Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud
images, as well as Ubuntu images available on Amazon’s EC2.“We last visited cloud-init during the build-up to the release
of Ubuntu 10.10, which introduced several key new features to the
software. What caught my eye recently was not the announcement of
new features, but several practical examples by Canonical
contributor Ahmed Kamal of how the package can be useful for
building and deploying a cloud environment.”