Creating Startup Scripts for VMs with Cloud-init

What you'll learn

Welcome to this course, _Creating Startup Scripts for VMs with Cloud-init_ using Azure VMs. Cloud-init is a popular open source approach to customizing a Linux VM on its very first boot. It can perform a wide range of actions such as installing applications, creating users, performing security actions, and much more across multiple versions of Linux. It is also natively supported on Azure Linux virtual machines and does not require extensions or additional agents to use it. With that said, there is a bit of a learning curve when formatting cloud-init configuration files as it uses a format called _MODULES_, which is different from the bash scripts that you may be used to. The objective of this course is to demystify how to create cloud-init configurations and use them to automatically configure new VMs. This is going to be a short and informative course, after which you should be more confident creating your own automated configuration steps for Linux virtual machines and become just a little bit more of an AUTOMATION guru!