As I started to use the OmniOS on AWS I ran into the problem that it does not, by default, include a way to execute the AWS User Data script when starting an instance. The User Data scripts provides a wonderful mechanism to bootstrap new instances. Without it, you may be required to use a configuration management tool or manually configure instances after they have booted.

The script is helpfully available through the instance metadata API at 169.254.169.254 with the URL http://169.254.169.254/2016-09-02/user-data. It should be simple to pull that down and execute the script with SMF!

I've put together a script to do this. It runs with SMF with a default timeout 15 minutes and will restart if there are errors. There is a handy dandy install script in the repo that will download and install the needed files. At the moment this isn't packaged as this script is needed before I would set up a package repository.

There is still the problem of how to get this into an AWS AMI. Packer can build the image for us so that the AMI we launch will already have this script. The buildfile for this image is rather simple but the whole process is a powerful one.

To get your own OmniOS AMI with AWSMF-Data installed you can use the above Packer build.

• Install Packer

• Clone the repo

$ git clone https://github.com/philipcristiano/packer-omnios.git`

• Execute build.sh after setting a few variables

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=...
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=...
$ export VPC_ID=...
$ export SUBNET_ID=...

$ ./build.sh

VPC_ID and SUBNET_ID are only required if you have a need to specify them (like no default VPC in your account), in which case the build.sh can be modified.

From here we can create User Data scripts in AWS and have new EC2 instances run code when they start!