An automated solution is needed to configure VMs in numerous cloud provider environments to connect the environments to an SDWAN. The SDWAN edge VM is provided as an image in each of the relevant…

Ansible is a configuration management tool that typically requires SSH or API access to a running VM, which conflicts with the requirement to configure solely via cloud-init without logging in.

Ansible is unnecessary here because cloud-init handles post-boot configuration; Terraform alone provisions the VM and delivers the cloud-init payload.

NSO is a network device orchestration platform designed for NETCONF/YANG-capable devices, not for provisioning cloud VMs or interacting with cloud provider APIs.

Terraform is a cloud-agnostic infrastructure provisioning tool that manages VM lifecycle across AWS, Azure, GCP, and other providers through their respective APIs. It supports passing cloud-init user-data at provision time, allowing the SDWAN edge VM to receive its identity and configuration at first boot without any SSH or console access. This is purely an infrastructure provisioning problem, not a network device configuration problem.

NSO is not relevant to cloud VM provisioning; the combination with Ansible also reintroduces the SSH dependency that cloud-init is intended to replace.