Azure image missing cloud-init with FreeBSD 14.1

Hello team,

For a new project we're considering using FreeBSD 14 on Azure VMs as our application runtime. So far, our testing has been positive, but we've hit a bump in the road today and I wanted to reach out and find out if it's really an issue or are we the ones looking at this from the wrong angle.

For context, our orchestration is fully automated, with Azure Devops pipelines and Terraform. We use Terraform to create the VMs and VMSSes (together with all the ancillary stuff) and make heavy use of cloud-init to bootstrap the VMs with everything that's necessary to obtain the final application runtime by passing the cloud-init custom data configuration from within Terraform. The problem is that during our testing, our custom data (i.e. cloud-config.yaml) was ignored. After SSH-ing into the VM, we found errors in the Azure WA Agent logs about not finding cloud-init. Upon closer inspection, indeed, cloud-init is missing from the system. There is a package (py311-cloud-init) which can be installed, though, but that would mean we'd have to bake our own image and then maintain one with each subsequent upstream release.

Is there any reason why cloud-init is not included with the Azure base-image? On the other hand, is cloud-init the proper way to bootstrap the VMs? I know cloud-init is rather linux-oriented, so is there a more BSD-favoured way of bootstrapping a VM on creation (except for Ansible, Chef or other third party solutions).

Looking forward to your response.
Claudiu