Afterburn is a one-shot agent for cloud-like platforms which interacts with provider-specific metadata endpoints. It is typically used in conjunction with Ignition.

It comprises several modules which may run at different times during the lifecycle of an instance.

Depending on the specific platform, the following services may run in the initramfs on first boot:

• setting local hostname
• injecting network command-line arguments

The following features are conditionally available on some platforms as systemd service units:

• installing public SSH keys for local system users
• retrieving attributes from instance metadata
• checking in to the provider in order to report a successful boot or instance provisioning

See Supported platforms.