 <p>Seems to partially work. Writing files seems to be fine but it seems to be failing on any runcmd. I think if you can get away w/ it do this:</p> <p>In the VM metadata create a key called user-data with your entire cloud config script in it as text. That will be picked up by the VM as it comes up.</p> <p>Then in startup-script paste all your commands you'd put in runcmd.</p> <p>All this may have ordering issues for you of course, but I don't any other way to do it.</p>