Comment 8 for bug 1885527

@Valery,

Some cloud platforms provide the instance id via some non-network channel (dmi data is common). In those cases, cloud-init will check cached value versus the locally-available instance-id before looking for a network available datasource.

So, if Hetzner provides that information in some way, cloud-init can use it.

If not, the only options are to for the user to disable cloud-init (touch /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled) or set manual_cache_clean (https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+bug/1712680/comments/11).

I'm not really sold on "what if the metadata service is DOWN" argument. Your cloud should not have its important services just fail. If it does, things are going to break. You could make a similar argument "What if DNS server is down?". I'm not discounting "Design for failure", and cloud-init could definitely do better here, but we need some support from the platform (locally available instance-id) to do better without sacrificing design goals.