User data through Azure Instance Metadata Service now generally available

Today, we are announcing the general availability of user data, enabling you to insert your own metadata into a Microsoft Azure virtual machine at provisioning time, with the ability to retrieve it using the Azure Instance Metadata Service (IMDS).

The newly released user data offers similar functionality as custom data. Custom data will continue to work as described in this article. The newly released functionality associated with user data has the following benefits over custom data:

• After the VM is provisioned, user data is available through IMDS inside the virtual machine.
• User data is persistent during the lifetime of the virtual machine instance.

For more details and the latest update on user data, read the User data with IMDS guidance.