Introduction
The metadata service can be used by a tool like cloud-init or cloud-config to bootstrap the server during first boot.
Some examples of things which can be managed:
- Creation of user accounts
- Provisioning of public SSH keys
- Installation of additional packages
- Run custom scripts and commands
Public keys for the main admin account (usually the root account) can be managed from the Tilaa dashboard at https://my.tilaa.com/ssh_keys
User-data can be used by creating a metadata profile using the Tilaa dashboard at https://my.tilaa.com/metadata and then assigning the metadata profile to one or more servers.
Supported operating systems using cloud-init
The following operating systems have cloud-init installed by default:
- CentOS 7 and up
- Fedora 22 and up
- Ubuntu Trusty and up
- Debian Jessie and up
The cloud-init documentation which describes available features and how to configure this service can be found here: https://cloudinit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
Supported operating systems using cloud-config
Cloud-config is currently only used by CoreOS, a distribution specifically designed for running service containers.
Documentation about how to use cloud-config can be found here: https://coreos.com/os/docs/latest/cloud-config.html
Notes
- Other operating systems provided by Tilaa are either not supported by cloud-init or have a broken implementation.
- Cloud-init and cloud-config only runs once during first boot. After that, no further metadata lookups are done, unless the cache is cleared or the VPS is re-installed.
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