Google Compute Engine

The GCE datasource gets its data from the internal compute meta-data server. The instance metadata service can be queried at the URL http://meta-data.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/ from within an instance. For more information see the GCE metadata docs.

Currently, the default project and instance level meta-data keys project/attributes/sshKeys and instance/attributes/ssh-keys are merged to provide public-keys.

user-data and user-data-encoding can be provided to cloud-init by setting those custom meta-data keys for an instance.

Configuration

The following configuration can be set for the datasource in system configuration (in /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg or /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/).

The settings that may be configured are:

  • retries

    The number of retries that should be attempted for a http request. This value is used only after metadata_url is selected.

    Default: 5

  • sec_between_retries

    The amount of wait time between retries when crawling the instance metadata service.

    Default: 1

Example

An example configuration with the default values is provided below:

datasource:
  GCE:
    retries: 5
    sec_between_retries: 1