Comment 8 for bug 1663315

Thierry, you're right. I'd like the platform to identify itself to the guest. And openstack already does this in libvirt/kvm and i386/x86_64 (which I suggest is by far the most common deployment path).

In order to create cross cloud-platform images there has to be some way to determine where an image is running, so it can behave appropriately for the platform.

Essentially, we have a communication mechanism in smbios/dmi where by the host says "You're running on OpenStack". Once that bit of information is established, cloud-init can then decide to reach the metadata service that openstack provides (http://169.254.169.254/openstack/).

Without the identification from the host, poking/polling at this network service can be problematic for many reasons.