Comment 0 for bug 1693361

apt-daily is now a systemd service rather than being invoked by cron.daily. If one builds a custom AMI it is possible that the apt-daily.timer will fire during boot. This can fire at the same time cloud-init is running and if cloud-init loses the race the invocation of apt (e.g. use of "packages:" in the config) will fail.

There is a lot of discussion online about this change to apt-daily (e.g. unattended upgrades happening during business hours, delaying boot, etc.) and discussion of potential systemd changes regarding timers firing during boot (c.f. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/5659).

While it would be better to solve this in apt itself, I suggest that cloud-init be defensive when calling apt and implement some retry mechanism.

Various instances of people running into this issue:

https://github.com/chef/bento/issues/609
https://clusterhq.atlassian.net/browse/FLOC-4486
https://github.com/boxcutter/ubuntu/issues/73
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/315502/how-to-disable-apt-daily-service-on-ubuntu-cloud-vm-image