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

AWS userdata is the set of commands/data you can provide to a instance at launch time. For example if you are launching an ec2 instance and want to have docker installed on the newly launched ec2, than you can provide set of bash commands in the userdata field of aws ec2 config page.

Usecase

• Automated deployments

• Orchestrating newly launched instance

• Bootstrapping newly launched instance with chef

• AWS Autoscaling

Here is a well explained example of AWS userdata with video tutorial