Note: this repository is not under active development; the author is working instead on https://cloudinit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

In contrast to cloud-init, the vision of this project is to be an ultra-small bootstrapping stage that one can use to start other management tools.

At present, it implements a very small subset of the AWS EC2 metadata API (which is also provided by the OpenStack hypervisor).

The list of requests implemented is:

• /2009-04-04/user-data:

  Execute arbitrary script (must start with #!, e.g. #!/bin/bash). The best practice is for this script to be idempotent, but min-cloud-agent will make a best effort to ensure this script runs exactly once when the system is first booted.

• /2009-04-04/meta-data/public-keys/0/openssh-key:

  Provision a single ssh key to the root account's .ssh/authorized_keys file. If the file already exists, it will not be modified.

In contrast to cloud-init, the user-data must be an interpreted program; it can not be the YAML cloud-config, have includes, or anything like that.

For example, suppose you want to add a user to the system. Rather than using cloud init's "users" attribute in the cloud-config YAML, you should simply invoke the operating system native tool, e.g. /usr/sbin/useradd directly in a shell script.

It's strongly recommended that all operating system vendors shipping min-cloud-agent include the curl utility. This will allow user-data script authors to download further code from a URL, or perform a POST to registration/state server announcing that the system is online.

Another very useful thing to do in user-data is to call into the system software management (e.g. yum/apt-get/rpm-ostree) to perform upgrades or install further applications (such as Docker) or higher level configuration management tools (such as Puppet).

min-cloud-agent will never grow an abstraction layer for any of these things; if you are scripting multiple operating systems or versions, your userdata scripts must carry the abstractions.

• GLib: https://git.gnome.org/browse/glib/
• libgsystem: https://git.gnome.org/browse/libgsystem/

• user-data
• configurable account for ssh keys
• hostname

cloud-init is a very featureful program - it has many data providers and backends. This leads to a fuzzy line between what it does and what other operating system management and configuration tools like Puppet should do. It means cloud-init is likely to keep growing.

Beyond simply being a large program in itself, cloud-init is written Python, and this agent is targeted at small host operating systems that don't necessarily include Python by default.

Use Github pull requests. You can discuss this program on the Fedora cloud list: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/cloud

min-cloud-agent is licensed under the LGPLv2+. See the COPYING file for more information.