Cloud-Init is the de facto industry standard for early-stage initialization of virtual machines in the cloud, but few engineers are familiar with everything that it has to offer.
All Linux virtual machines have Cloud-Init in their boot phase, whether they're as small as a t3.nano instance in AWS, as large as a Standard_HB60rs in Azure, or and on-premise OpenStack instance. Originally designed for Ubuntu in EC2, Cloud-Init provides at-first-boot configuration support across most Linux distributions and all major clouds.
Many operators are familiar with supplying a shell script via user-data when provisioning their compute resources, but Cloud-Init has a massive amount of other functionality that is, more often than not, left untapped.
In this talk, Event Store co-founder James Nugent explores that untapped potential by looking through some of the features of Cloud-Init and how to take advantage of them to improve the operability and resilience of your cloud operations.