curl does not retry if it is unable to connect to the metadata server.
For some reason, when creating a new AMI with a recent nixpkgs, the
metadata server would not be available when fetch-ec2-data ran. Switching
to wget that can retry even on TCP connection errors solved this problem.
I also made the fetch-ec2-data depend on ip-up.target, to get it to start
a bit later.
Using pkgs.lib on the spine of module evaluation is problematic
because the pkgs argument depends on the result of module
evaluation. To prevent an infinite recursion, pkgs and some of the
modules are evaluated twice, which is inefficient. Using ‘with lib’
prevents this problem.