I am looking to run a startup script on a linux virtual machine when I create and start it with the Azure Python SDK. How should I go about doing this?
You can add the cloud-init as the value of the custom_data in the VM os_profile. But as the property shows:
Specifies a base-64 encoded string of custom data. The base-64 encoded string is decoded to a binary array that is saved as a file on the Virtual Machine. The maximum length of the binary array is 65535 bytes.
Its value should be a base-64 encoded string. You can how to do it from another issue.