Topic: first-boot

• Windows first-boot provisioning agents in the cloud: EC2Launch v2, the Azure VM Agent, and cloudbase-init

  AWS, Azure and most other clouds run a small agent inside a Windows image that processes user data or custom data on first boot; the common agents are EC2Launch v2, Azure's provisioning and Windows VM agents (which store custom data in CustomData.bin but do not execute it) and the open-source cloudbase-init. Each logs to a different location worth checking when provisioning appears to have silently failed.

  article · en · reviewed · knowledge as of 2026-09-24

Machine-readable: JSON