Comment 3 for bug 1594576

Package installation problems were caused by network issues, not a problem within cloud-init. I believe it's just repo.salt.stack.com occasionally timing out. It hasn't been reliably reproducible.

I've worked around the issue by switching to write_files - that effectively provides the unconditional salt minion config that I was looking for.

Not sure if this behavior is really a bug - perhaps someone would want configuration to fail if package installation failed. If cloud-init folks think the current behavior is correct, feel free to close.

Thanks,
Ross