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Excerpts from Susaant Kondapaneni's message of 2014-01-06 09:25:08 -0800:
> Hi Steve,
> 
> I am trying to understand the software config implementation. Can you
> clarify the following:
> 
> i. To use Software config and deploy in a template, instance resource MUST
> always be accompanied by user_data. User_data should specify how to
> bootstrap CM tool and signal it. Is that correct?
> 
> ii. Supposing we were to use images which do not have cloud-init packaged
> in them, (and a custom CM tool that won't require bootstrapping on the
> instance itself), can we still use software config and deploy resources to
> deploy software on such instances?

If you don't have cloud-init, you are entirely on your own. Heat
requires cloud-init to be able to do anything beyond boot an instance
with your specified parameters.

> 
> iii. If ii. were possible who would signal the deployment resource to
> indicate that the instance is ready for the deployment?
> 

So what you'd end up with is userdata (in the nova/ec2/config-drive
sense) in multi-part mime format that cloud-init expects. You can
absolutely write your own tools to interpret that (please don't,
cloud-init is lovely) and then submit results back using the API as
defined. But... why?