rightscale init script

Could you provide details or pointers to the appropriate code? (I'm also incorporate these into some images I build for clients.)

I'd like to suggest that this rightscale script could be inserted as user-data.

The ubuntu ec2 images support executing arbitrary content passed in via user-data. This hook should be powerful enough to allow the rightscale script to be provided to ec2-init in that user-data and do whatever magic it needs to do.

The benefit of dynamically inserting the script over being hard coded is that there is no need for rightscale to request a ec2-init package upgrade to change their init scripts.

I dont think we have very good doc over how user-data content is handled at the moment, but the implementation is in ec2-run-user-data (http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Eubuntu-branches/ubuntu/karmic/ec2-init/karmic/annotate/head%3A/ec2-run-user-data.py) and ec2-init's (http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Eubuntu-branches/ubuntu/karmic/ec2-init/karmic/annotate/head%3A/ec2-init) invocation of that.

Here is the current documentation for user-data scripts: http://alestic.com/2009/06/ec2-user-data-scripts
And the original, reference implementation (run at S71 on Ubuntu): http://ec2-run-user-data.notlong.com

RightScale has completely different specs for how user-data is handled in their environment for their own hooks and for users to pass in information, so I don't think they would be compatible with user-data scripts.

The benefit of the current approach with RightScale's lightweight init script is that it only activates and installs RightScale software if it is running in the RightScale environment.

Amazon only provides one way to pass in data to an instance (user-data) and the content of that triggers whether startup should be done with RightScale, user-data scripts, or with alternate user-defined mechanisms.

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.

Closing this based on comment 6.
The solution for rightscale will be to inject rightscale scripts into ubuntu images via the user-data hooks.

This bug was fixed in the package ec2-init - 0.4.999-0ubuntu2

---------------
ec2-init (0.4.999-0ubuntu2) karmic; urgency=low

  * remove rightscale-init from package (see LP: #434181, LP: #434693)
  * fix lintian warning, specify path to GPL-3
  * replace multiple '| logger' in regenerate_ssh_host_keys single one
  * add ec2-is-compat-env, and disable init script by default. it can be
    enabled by setting 'compat=1' in /etc/ec2-init/is-compat-env

 -- Scott Moser <email address hidden> Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:32:42 -0400