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Mainly for getting managed-identity access tokens for Azure APIs. In AWS you can call it to get temporary credentials for the EC2’s attached IAM role. In both cases - you use IMDS to get tokens/creds for identity/access management.

Client libraries usually abstract away the need to call IMDS directly by calling it for you.

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Thank you, and everyone else who responded. So then this type of service seems to be used by other cloud providers (AWS). What makes this Azure service so much more insecure than its AWS equivalent?

Thanks again!

[edited phrasing]

Having it running on host (!), and the metadata for all guest VMs stored and managed by the same memory/service (!!), with no clear security boundary (!!!).

It's like storing all your nuke launch codes in the same vault, right in the middle of Washington DC national mall. Things are okay, until they are not okay.

Lovely explanation :)

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