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+Amazon EC2
+==========
+
+The EC2 datasource is the oldest and most widely used datasource that
+cloud-init supports. This datasource interacts with a *magic* ip that is
+provided to the instance by the cloud provider. Typically this ip is
+``169.254.169.254`` of which at this ip a http server is provided to the
+instance so that the instance can make calls to get instance userdata and
+instance metadata.
+
+Metadata is accessible via the following URL:
+
+::
+    
+    GET http://169.254.169.254/2009-04-04/meta-data/
+    ami-id
+    ami-launch-index
+    ami-manifest-path
+    block-device-mapping/
+    hostname
+    instance-id
+    instance-type
+    local-hostname
+    local-ipv4
+    placement/
+    public-hostname
+    public-ipv4
+    public-keys/
+    reservation-id
+    security-groups
+
+Userdata is accessible via the following URL:
+
+::
+    
+    GET http://169.254.169.254/2009-04-04/user-data
+    1234,fred,reboot,true | 4512,jimbo, | 173,,,
+
+Note that there are multiple versions of this data provided, cloud-init
+by default uses **2009-04-04** but newer versions can be supported with
+relative ease (newer versions have more data exposed, while maintaining
+backward compatibility with the previous versions). 
+
+To see which versions are supported from your cloud provider use the following URL:
+
+::
+    
+    GET http://169.254.169.254/
+    1.0
+    2007-01-19
+    2007-03-01
+    2007-08-29
+    2007-10-10
+    2007-12-15
+    2008-02-01
+    2008-09-01
+    2009-04-04
+    ...
+    latest
+
+.. vi: textwidth=78