thanks, for taking it to the support - the sample you provided is far away from what I try to achieve (the above was just a short extract).

I am just wondering that there are not much more requests as the users module is quite essential for bootstrapping a system.

Therefore again: Getting this working is very important - at least to me :)

Update: It seems to work fine on AMS3, however, I assume DO should fix that on AMS2 anyway... (No config management there? ;) )

Hey! I brought this up with the engineers responsible for our metadata service and cloud-init implementation. They were not able to reproduce the issue, and I am not able to anymore. I've successfully used with following cloud-config file to create servers in both AMS2 and AMS3.

#cloud-config

users:
  - name: asb
    groups: wheel
    sudo: ['ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL']
    shell: /bin/bash
    ssh-authorized-keys:
      - ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDGibGRgqmPeCydQhrUWthMbaeryIoFsALE+MATT17h8Vv0TU9dnygsDE5Knu/iA6TgxvlqI6a+OVuOpWadr20T16ZInxo11/0DCtfoqIdAHDy74x0waTK3mZPlQevUxbuqPYwWY2B4hqpb3+byeWYtG4oUk/yTjnKxg5Mz6UiKixw+C63s79K9Q7EYLO2ljRHL8WbyUdjlYiIMC/gdbhNUWh9nG0eKKLfU6YoL4LkoCMImDeg2xqdv20xgkhU+F3PhqYtMe047S7JtoMhem3Z7F94HjszJvI9hTIqCKoZfxsnNYnOyWAGN8ySc6IRPnbb91xWheimwMq+yVeUoO5xP asb@asb-do

runcmd:
  - sed -i -e '/^PermitRootLogin/s/^.*$/PermitRootLogin yes/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  - sed -i -e '$aAllowUsers asb' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  - service sshd restart

So this does not infact seem to be an issue with our cloud-init implementation. I totally realize that is not a very satisfying answer. Without more details, it is hard to know what might be causing the issue loading packages. At first blush, it sounds like there might be some sort of networking issue. Could you please open a support ticket so that the team can take a look at the specifics of your situation (the physical hypervisor that your failed deploys were on, etc...).

well... thanks for looking into it, however, looking at the error log(s), I do see still some (apt?!) issues here (while creating a droplet AMS2 and CentOS7).

Just to list some of those errors:

...
2015-01-07 11:11:19,518 - util.py[WARNING]: Unable to change the ownership of /var/log/cloud-init.log to user syslog, group adm
...
2015-01-07 11:11:20,304 - stages.py[WARNING]: Could not find module named cc_ubuntu_init_switch
...
2015-01-07 11:11:21,501 - util.py[WARNING]: Running locale (<module 'cloudinit.config.cc_locale' from '/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudinit/config/cc_locale.pyc'>) failed
...
2015-01-07 11:11:21,535 - util.py[WARNING]: Failed to run debconf-set-selections for grub-dpkg
2015-01-07 11:11:21,557 - util.py[WARNING]: Running apt-configure (<module 'cloudinit.config.cc_apt_configure' from '/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudinit/config/cc_apt_configure.pyc'>) failed
...

It gets worse, when you try to add some packages:

Cloud-init v. 0.7.5 running 'modules:config' at Wed, 07 Jan 2015 16:27:00 +0000. Up 6.84 seconds.
2015-01-07 11:27:00,867 - util.py[WARNING]: Running locale (<module 'cloudinit.config.cc_locale' from '/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudinit/config/$
2015-01-07 11:27:00,897 - util.py[WARNING]: Failed to run debconf-set-selections for grub-dpkg
2015-01-07 11:27:00,917 - util.py[WARNING]: Running apt-configure (<module 'cloudinit.config.cc_apt_configure' from '/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/clo$
2015-01-07 11:27:00,934 - util.py[WARNING]: Package update failed
2015-01-07 11:27:00,951 - util.py[WARNING]: Failed to install packages: ['ntp', 'httpd', 'mariadb-server']
2015-01-07 11:27:00,951 - cc_package_update_upgrade_install.py[WARNING]: 2 failed with exceptions, re-raising the last one
2015-01-07 11:27:00,952 - util.py[WARNING]: Running package-update-upgrade-install (<module 'cloudinit.config.cc_package_update_upgrade_install' from '/u$
Cloud-init v. 0.7.5 running 'modules:final' at Wed, 07 Jan 2015 16:27:01 +0000. Up 7.42 seconds.

For reproduction on your site, you can use the following script, modifying SomeUser and your own public Key.
For splitting tests, run a test with "packages" modul (red section) and one without it).

#cloud-config

# log all cloud-init process output (info & errors) to a logfile
output: {all: ">> /var/log/cloud-init-output.log"}

# final_message written to log when cloud-init processes are finished
final_message: "System boot (via cloud-init) is COMPLETE, after $UPTIME seconds. Finished at $TIMESTAMP"

#creating new user 
users:
  - name: SomeUser
    groups: wheel
    sudo: ['ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL']
    shell: /bin/bash
    ssh-authorized-keys:
      - ssh-dss AAAABBBBCCCCCDDD...

packages:
  - ntp
  - httpd
  - mariadb-server

runcmd:
  #Enable EPEL Repo
  - yum -y install epel-release
  - rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-7
  #Enforce SHH Protocol 2
  - sed -i -e 's/#Protocol 2/Protocol 2/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  - sed -i -e 's/#LoginGraceTime 2m/LoginGraceTime 2m/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  - sed -i -e 's/#PermitRootLogin yes/PermitRootLogin no/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  #Use key-based authentication, whenever possible, instead of basic authentication (username + password) to log on to your server remotely.
  - sed -i -e 's/PasswordAuthentication yes/PasswordAuthentication no/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  - sed -i -e 's/#RSAAuthentication yes/RSAAuthentication yes/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  - sed -i -e 's/#PubkeyAuthentication yes/PubkeyAuthentication yes/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  - sed -i -e '$aAllowUsers SomeUser' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  - service sshd restart

  #firewall
  - systemctl start firewalld
  - firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=ssh
  - firewall-cmd --reload
  - systemctl enable firewalld

My problem is similar.

Only that the cloud-config works 33% of the time... (I see the same ubuntu warning)