Built-in 'centos-6' with no cloud-init installed by default?

[Pedro Diogo]

Hello everyone,

I need to boot a VM making use of cloud-init metadata
such as: 

zone

.createVM(name, {

os: 'centos-6',

metadata: {

items: [{

key: "user-data",

value: b64CloudConfig

}]

},

networkInterfaces: [{

accessConfigs: [{

type: "ONE_TO_ONE_NAT",

name: "External NAT",

// natIP: address

}],

"network": "global/networks/default"

}],

})

.then(data => {

but it is failing as, apparently, there is no cloud-init install per default on this centos-6/7 public image. 

As I need cloud-init for these VMs, do I need to first create an OS of my own? If so, would I then be able to create a VM properly with the provided cloud-config? Could not really find any info regarding

user-data

metadata key, so I am not really sure if it will work. Also, it will be b64 encoded. 

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Regards,

[Fady (Google Cloud Platform)]

Hello Pedro,

From the example above, it seems that you are using OpenStack to create a VM instance. Hence, if you are trying to create a VM instance on Google Compute Engine the above will not work.

In a nutshell, metadata is implemented differently in Google Compute Engine, and does not use cloud-init packages. A similar functionality to OpenStack “user-data” would be using a startup-script and shutdown-script, but with the difference that they execute every time you restart your instance. You may check the differences between Openstack and Google Compute Engine at this document.

[Pedro Diogo]

Hi Fady,

Thank you very much for this. Really appreciated.

The VM is actually created with an external IP (managed to get this ephemeral ip via the accessConfigs array ). 

I am thus strugling to understand why the user-data did not work. I'm ok with using OpenStack. Shouldn't it have worked fine? Is it a OS problem, or am I using the lib incorrectly? Apologies, but I don't understand what the problem is. I understand the differences between OpenStack and GCP, but this code did work except for the user-data (cloud-config).

I'm using the const Compute = require('@google-cloud/compute'); package - is this the problem? Does it work only for GCP?

Again, thank you very much.

Regards,

[Fady (Google Cloud Platform)]

Hello Pedro,

I am not suggesting to use OpenStack, as that was just my assumption that you are using it due to your code. If you are trying to use cloud-init, the package does not come pre-installed on any image on GCE with the exception of Container Optimized images like this example.

However, as I explained in my past message a startup/shutdown script is an alternative as per this document. That said, you may either use the key:” startup-script” or manually install cloud-init, and create a custom metadata as per this suggestion at this cloud-init document. If you chose the latter, I found this github page that could be helpful in setting up cloud-init with the correct metadata paths.

As for your last question, you seem to be using the correct client libraries for Node.js per this document.

[Frank Müller]

Hi Fady,

In our project we so far use the images 'coreos-stable / coreos-cloud'  and 'ubuntu-1804-lts / ubuntu-os-cloud'  with cloud-init. Now we wanted to add 'centos-7 / centos-cloud' and found out that there is no cloud-init. Any solution?

Thanks,

Mue