Ubuntu 16.04 Images Report Errors About EC2 Metadata Service

Reported Issue

Upon boot, some older Ubuntu 16.04 instances may show the following warning:

**************************************************************************
# This system is using the EC2 Metadata Service, but does not appear to  #
# be running on Amazon EC2 or one of cloud-init's known platforms that   #
# provide a EC2 Metadata service. In the future, cloud-init may stop     #
# reading metadata from the EC2 Metadata Service unless the platform can #
# be identified.                                                         #
#                                                                        #
# If you are seeing this message, please file a bug against              #
# cloud-init at                                                          #
#    https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+filebug?field.tags=dsid      #
# Make sure to include the cloud provider your instance is               #
# running on.                                                            #
#                                                                        #
# For more information see                                               #
#   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1660385                              #
#                                                                        #
# After you have filed a bug, you can disable this warning by            #
# launching your instance with the cloud-config below, or                #
# putting that content into                                              #
#    /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/99-ec2-datasource.cfg                        #
#                                                                        #
# #cloud-config                                                          #
# datasource:                                                            #
#  Ec2:                                                                  #
#   strict_id: false                                                     #
**************************************************************************

Root Cause

This happens due to a change that Ubuntu has made to cloud-init. Details can be found here. Vultr ended support for cloud-init in late 2016. If you are using a snapshot created in 2016 or running an Ubuntu 16.04 instance from 2016, you may still have cloud-init installed.

There are a few ways to resolve the warning:

• If you see the warning from a snapshot that you frequently deploy, we'd suggest recreating the snapshot from a fresh install.
• If you are seeing the warning on a running instance, we'd suggest removing cloud-init with apt-get remove cloud-init.
• If you rely on cloud-init, you can follow the instructions documented at the end of the error message to suppress this message.