Sometimes network bringup for cloud images is racy because some environments may be slower than others in initializing hardware, etc.. One example of some complaints is in:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1194623

A proposal there is to use systemd-networkd (rather than network scripts) so that the network can be brought up only after the device is ready. The problem here is cloud-init doesn't know about systemd-networkd and statically configured networking via cloud-init won't work.

Statically configured networking in cloud-images is a small use case but still one we want to consider before making this change.

We also need to get with releng to write out a systemd-networkd file rather that a network scripts file.