Comment 3 for bug 861866

It waits 60 seconds for something other than "lo" to appear in /var/run/network/ifstate. That doesn't actually correlate with an interface having a working address. ifup brings the interface up, and writes out that file, then runs dhclient3. On a network with STP, you could be looking at 60 seconds before the switch starts forwarding traffic, and however long the DHCP server takes to respond after that before you have a working network.

But because cloud-init-nonet only checks to see if the ifstate file is updated, it exits immediately.

No, I don't have "cloud" instance that takes that long, however cloud-init is being used by juju for orchestra deployments now. This is running on bare metal.