cloud-init blocks the boot process if it can't reach its MAAS datasource

[Junien F]

Hi,

Using cloud-init 18.2-27-g6ef92c98-0ubuntu1~18.04.1 on ubuntu 18.04, MAAS provider.

The server got firewalled off its MAAS after installation. At the next reboot, cloud-init held the boot for at least 7 minutes before I had to interrupt the boot process to apt-remove cloud-init in single mode, which allowed the server to boot fine.

Relevant cloud-init.log lines : https://pastebin.canonical.com/p/2JfCK4Vwzr/
Relevant cloud-init-output.log lines : https://pastebin.canonical.com/p/KXpdTZKVPW/

Thanks

Related bugs:
 * bug 1712680: cloud-init re-generates network config every reboot overwriting manual admin changes on CentOS.

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

This is known behavior, and expected.
cloud-init uses the metadata service to tell it if it is a new instance (and should run per-instance things).
That does create a dependency on the metadata service.

That said, I had hoped that we improved this under bug 1712680.

[James Falcon (falcojr)]

Tracked in Github Issues as https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/issues/3212