The feature or use case here involves obtaining a token to access instance metadata securely. This is commonly used in cloud environments, especially in automation, deployment scripts, and when an instance needs to securely access its own metadata without needing to store or hard-code credentials.

To see it in action, you first grab the token (valid for 6 hours in this example) and then use it:

The specific use of curl with this URL and path suggests a command-line operation to fetch this token. For example, a command might look something like:

Once you have the $TOKEN , you can use it to fetch information (e.g., IAM role credentials, instance ID).

This article explains: