The Tilaa platform provides an Amazon EC2-compatible Metadata Service. This service allows your VPS to query information about itself (such as IP addresses, hostnames, and SSH keys) without needing external API calls.
The service is available at http://169.254.169.254/.
This IP address is only accessible from within the VPS itself. It is not reachable from the public internet.
How to retrieve Metadata
You can query the service using a simple tool like curl or wget. This is particularly useful for bootstrap scripts that need to know the server's public IP or ID.
1. Listing available categories
To see what data is available, query the root directory:
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/2. Fetching specific values
Append the category name to the URL to get the plain text value.
Get Instance ID:
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id
# Output: 50977499-7c1c-477e...Get Public IPv4 Address:
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4
# Output: 1.2.3.4Get Hostname:
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/hostnameRetrieving User Data (Cloud-init)
If you provided a startup script (User Data) during the deployment of your VPS, it is stored here.
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-dataThis is the endpoint that Cloud-init uses automatically during the first boot to configure your users and software. You can also query it manually to debug your scripts.
Compatibility
Because our implementation is compatible with the EC2 standard, most existing DevOps tools and scripts designed for AWS will work seamlessly on Tilaa without modification, provided they rely on the standard /latest/meta-data/ structure.