@dinhngtu Really appreciate the help finally got it working. In Debian 12 I was able to boot to it without issues even with 3GB but obviously not recommended for logs etc...
Testing for Debian 13 now to see if there is something else affecting it.
I think part of the issue is to use only generic or genericcloud and avoid nocloud as its doesn't come with cloud-init install...
They mention this on the site where we download it. Didn't quite understand until now...:
azure: Optimized for the Microsoft Azure environment
ec2: Optimized for the Amazon EC2
generic: Should run in any environment using cloud-init, for e.g. OpenStack, DigitalOcean and also on bare metal.
genericcloud: Identical to generic but with a reduced set of hardware drivers in the kernel. If it does not work for your use case, you should use the generic images.
nocloud: Does not run cloud-init and boots directly to a root prompt. Useful for local VM instantiation with tools like QEMU. (so it sound like it does not work with cloud init on this version but it boot up so that was extremely deceiving...)