Cloud-Init Stuck During Boot on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

📖 ~1 min read

Table of contents

1. Symptom & Impact
2. Environment & Reproduction
3. Root Cause Analysis
4. Quick Triage
5. Step-by-Step Diagnosis
6. Solution – Primary Fix
7. Solution – Alternative Approaches
8. Verification & Acceptance Criteria
9. Rollback Plan
10. Prevention & Hardening
11. Related Errors & Cross-Refs
12. References & Further Reading

Symptom & Impact

Boot pauses for cloud-init and SSH access is delayed.

Environment & Reproduction

Occurs on VMs with unreachable metadata source or malformed user-data.

Root Cause Analysis

Datasource probing timeouts block completion of cloud-init stages.

Quick Triage

Check cloud-init status with sudo cloud-init status –long.

Step-by-Step Diagnosis

Review /var/log/cloud-init.log and /var/log/cloud-init-output.log for datasource errors.

Solution – Primary Fix

Set correct datasource in /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d and run sudo cloud-init clean –logs then reboot.

Solution – Alternative Approaches

Disable cloud-init on non-cloud templates with sudo touch /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled.

Verification & Acceptance Criteria

cloud-init finishes quickly and boot target reaches multi-user without delay.

Rollback Plan

Restore original cloud-init configs from backup if instance provisioning regresses.

Prevention & Hardening

Validate user-data syntax before deployment and keep datasource config explicit.

Related Errors & Cross-Refs

Related: datasource not found and timeout waiting for metadata.

Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

View all Ubuntu 24.04 LTS tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →

Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.

References & Further Reading

cloud-init upstream docs and Ubuntu cloud image guides.