Comment 5 for bug 1923045

Yes, a
lock_passwd: false

is required to enable the password.

So
- remove the identity section complety
- change password: key to passwd:
- add lock_passwd: false
- wait for some time after first login prompt

is what is needed to get the hadmut1 account and login with password 'ubuntu'. hadmut2 is never created and hadmut3 is temporarily created on the temporary machine performing the installation procedure.

So it's rather a problem of insufficient documentation than of cloud-init itself.

However, cloud-init had formerly already caused me plenty of headache and debugging work since it is not obvious that cloud-init remains active and changing the machine after first boot. Problems I had was that cloud-init resets a change hostname to what it has stored somewhere in a file, thus making it impossible to change the host name permanently, or recreating the ssh host keys because of timing problems when renaming the ethernet device twice, having problems to identify and believing to be on a new machine. All of these effects seem to not have been documented.