Comment 1 for bug 407871

I believe the fix incorporated for bug 308530 (present in karmic/20090811.2/ubuntu-ec2-karmic-amd64.img.gz) should address your concerns that were listed above. In short, the /etc/init.d/ec2-init script now runs ec2-wait-for-meta-data-service before doing anything else in 'start'. and that program will block until meta-data service is up.

Please re-open if you believe this isn't fixed.