cloud-init is an industry standard instance initialization tool that allows you to inject customized configurations into a Droplet at creation time, such as setting up a user with specific privileges. Using cloud-init can save you provisioning and setup time by allowing you to automate common setup tasks.
For example, to edit your network configuration to configure your Droplet as a VPC gateway, you can edit the cloud-init YAML file as needed.
You can enable or disable cloud-init’s network configurations for your VPC gateway. cloud-init also contains many of your Droplet’s configuration details, including the Droplet’s network settings. You can alter a Droplet’s cloud-init file to adjust these settings as necessary. cloud-init consumes the metadata that you specify in the user data field seen on the Droplet creation page which speeds up the process of [setting up your Droplet]/products/networking/vpc/how-to/create/.
cloud-init is available for Ubuntu images.