Since we announced our metadata service in August, we have expanded this functionality’s availability and how you can use it to accelerate compute instance setup.

cloud-init is a universally compatible standard for customizing cloud instances across providers and can be used in place of or along with StackScripts . Though StackScripts work well on our platform, we wanted to make it easier for developers migrating to or using Akamai cloud computing services alongside other cloud providers by using industry-standard scripting.

Functioning as a light infrastructure as code tool, cloud-init metadata makes it easy to “plug and play” scripted deployments to reduce the overall work needed to set up a new compute instance. On our platform, use cloud-init to:

Manage users and user groups on new compute instances;

Automatically install software when your compute instance finishes provisioning; and

Execute bash scripts on first boot.

This service also enables you to build custom images on our platform.…