Comment 2 for bug 890501

Thanks for the bug report.
I believe that you should be able to simply add an entry above the one labeled 'cloud-init'

$ grep -v :: /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.2 superman.brickies.net superman

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
# Added by cloud-init
127.0.1.1 ip-10-212-231-182.ec2.internal ip-10-212-231-182
$ cat /etc/hostname
superman
$ hostname -f
superman.brickies.net
$ ping -c 1 superman.brickies.net -q
PING superman.brickies.net (127.0.1.2) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- superman.brickies.net ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.028/0.028/0.028/0.000 ms