Running as a cloud image can be relatively easy, you only need the default drivers from the kernel and need to get your image installed.
replyThe latter can be done by booting into another distro and kexec'ing into your own kernel and performing the Installation afterward from memory. See also nixos-anywhere for a practical implementation of this
On digital ocean (at least) you can upload your own images and boot droplets directly from them.
replyIn the past I've used a script called "alpine-make-vm-image" to run alpine images in digital ocean.
https://github.com/alpinelinux/alpine-make-vm-image
(Maybe that script does some magic to make booting a droplet directly from the image possible. On that I plead ignorance :)
Make an image with virtio drivers for network and storage, save it or convert it to qcow2 then register it into Digitalocean etc, it's quite easy.
reply