Amazon ec2 user-data, how does it work?

Question

We are starting instances, and accessing the user-data we place. But does anybody understand the internals of this operation (from Amazon\'s side)? When we pass in the user-

Answer 1

The user-data is available to the instance with a simple HTTP request at this URL:

http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data

Amazon EC2 does not put this user-data on the instance directly, though many AMIs have code that instructs the instance to download and process the user-data automatically.

See also:

• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-instance-metadata.html

• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/user-data.html