Amazon Linux 2023 Set up and cloud-init configuration when used outside Amazon EC2 - Amazon Linux 2023
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Amazon Linux 2023 Set up and cloud-init configuration when used outside Amazon EC2

This section covers how to set up and configure a Amazon Linux 2023 virtual machine when not run directly on Amazon EC2, such as when on KVM, VMware, or Hyper-V.

By default, an Amazon Linux 2023 virtual machine images don’t come provisioned with any user password or ssh key and will obtain its network configuration via DHCP on the first discovered network interface. This means that by default, without additional configuration, there is no way to connect to the resulting virtual machine.

Thus, some form of configuration needs to be provided to the virtual machine. The standard mechanism to do this for Amazon Linux is via cloud-init data sources.

Amazon Linux 2023 has been qualified with the following data sources:

NoCloud

This is the traditional method of configuring on-premises images via a virtual CD-ROM containing a seed ISO9660 image with cloud-init configuration files.

VMware

Amazon Linux 2023 additionally supports configuring VMware images running on vSphere via the VMware specific data source via VMware guestinfo.userdata and guestinfo.metadata.

Note

The configuration of the data sources can differ from Amazon Linux 2. More specifically, Amazon Linux 2023 uses systemd-networkd for its configuration and requires the use of cloud-init "Networking Config Version 2" as documented in the cloud-init network configuration documentation.

The complete documentation for cloud-init configuration mechanisms for the version of cloud-init packaged in Amazon Linux 2023 can be found in the upstream cloud-init documentation.