Question

A microservice running on cloud VMs uses the instance metadata service to retrieve temporary IAM credentials on every outbound API call. During peak traffic, developers report intermittent authorization failures, and application logs show HTTP 429 responses when the service queries the metadata endpoint. IAM permissions and role trust policies are confirmed correct. What is the MOST likely root cause?

Accepted Answer

The application is not caching the temporary credentials and is exceeding the metadata service request rate limit

Answer

The IAM role's temporary credentials have expired and are not being refreshed

Answer

A network security group rule is dropping return traffic from the metadata endpoint

Answer

The instance profile is attached to the wrong region and cannot resolve the metadata endpoint