From the course: Amazon EC2 Essential Training

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EC2 user data

EC2 user data

- [Instructor] Now let's talk about EC2 user data. User data can be used to run scripts at instance startup. That is when the instance is booting up. It can be used to automate a variety of configuration tasks, and by default it is only executed when the instance is first launched. User data can be used to configure common tasks such as updating packages on the instance, installing a web server at launch time, installing an agent, backing up logs, and updating device configuration. When configuring user data on Linux AMIs, it can be in the form of shell scripts or cloud init directives. Shell scripts are run by the shell, which is the command line interpreter. Cloud Init is a package that allows you to initialize and configure cloud instances, such as EC2 instances. It is an open source package and it is also used to configure virtual machines of other cloud computing providers. Cloud Init is commonly preferred for…

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