Provide your own cloud image with the changes you want. This is common practise to ensure the best integration in your infrastructure.
In general, there are so many things that you want to customize in an image tailored to your infrastructure, so that you end up building and providing the images yourself. This can be done in any CI environment and automatic on every change in the GIT leading to the image or security updates in the background. We do this for many years and yes, it is a little bit of work in the beginning, but after automation every new OS version is a minor change and you're good to go. We also have our own local mirrors for fast install, provide our own additional packages and configuration files and then customize again on VM provisioning.