Today’s blog post discusses how the OpenStack metadata service works, and it was written by Michael Crane, the OpenStack Lead in VMware’s Global Support Services(GSS).

OpenStack provides a metadata service for cloud instances. This metadata is useful for accessing instance-specific information from within the instance. The primary purpose of this capability is to apply customizations to the instance during boot time if cloud-init or cloudbase-init is configured on your Linux or Windows image, respectively. However, instance metadata can be accessed at any time after the instance boots by the user or by applications running on the instance. In this article, we will describe how the metadata service is implemented in VIO, how to access the metadata from instances, and how to leverage the metadata for in-guest customization. Continue reading →