Summary

Occasionally Elastic Agent creation calls fail with the error Invalid Base64 encoding of user data

Expected Results

All elastic Agent calls succeed with creation of a new Elastic Agent

Actual Results

Occasionally the creation attempt will fail:
The below exception is thrown in the xxxxxxx.log file:

com.amazonaws.services.ec2.model.AmazonEC2Exception: Invalid BASE64 encoding of user data (Service: AmazonEC2; Status Code: 400; Error Code: InvalidParameterValue; Request ID: 24be1899-d089-48a5-b658-559d39a2034b)

Workaround

When failed, a new elastic agent call is made and the new agent starts normally.

Notes

it looks like when we use ava.util.Base64.getMimeEncoder().encodeToString(userData) to encode the userData for the instance (specifically the keypair generated per-instance) it is occasionally encoded with extra carriage returns which prevent proper decoding by AWS API.