All, I finally found the time to do some testing with the F20 image in HP Cloud Beta which runs some sort of OpenStack Havana. Here are my comments (which are obviously very OpenStack centric): Overall it looks very sound. Good job, Matt! As mentioned by others, logging could be improved. Currently, only kernel messages are written to the (serial) console log. If something goes wrong higher up in the stack (like cloud-init is unable to contact the metadata service or a crucial initrd process fails) we can't tell, unless there's access to the virtual console of the instance which not every cloud operator provides. If we reverse the 'console' options of the kernel command line, we get those messages on the serial console which helps with debugging boot issues. Also, I'm not sure how useful the 115200n8 ttyS0 option is, it's a virtual port after all. Lastly, Ubuntu uses console=tty1 instead of tty0 for reasons explained in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cloud-init/+bug/1016695. I admit I do not fully understand the impact of using tty1 (first console) vs tty0 (foreground console) and neither do I think we need to blindly copy Ubuntu but they are the cloud-init guys after all and they do provide very solid OpenStack cloud images so it seems like they know what they're doing :-) Given that, my proposal is to use the following console kernel command line options: 'console=tty1 console=ttyS0' I was quite surprised to learn that the image can be enlarged to 2TB. Other images fail because the ext4 journal is too small. I haven't looked into it in detail but do you use special parameters when formatting the root partition? ...Juerg