Comment 6 for bug 434181

So using this proposed method of injecting scripts into the user data does pose some significant limitations. In our case, we are not the end users of instances that are launched on our system, RightScale is only facilitating the launching and management of cloud servers for others. A big concern is that this scheme is not extensible; a giant blob must be written by a single party who must have all of the requisite knowledge on hand to write the script and any corresponding user-data. This raises backward-compatibility concerns of ourselves and our users (some of whose apps rely on the "traditional" user-data format). For theses reasons, if launching ec2 images requires us to enforce that only mime-type encoded data can be inserted it will be a significant limitation on users who need to insert their own custom data.

However, we're excited by the idea of a standard format for metadata that allows several parties to contribute to a given instance's meta-data. We can clearly see the long-term appeal of a standard format for metadata, and for code that gets injected into the instance via metadata. It is the right direction. Because of this we should go ahead and remove the rightscale-init script from the ec2-init package and adapt our site to use the user-data script injection instead.