Query EC2 tags from within instance

Question

Amazon recently added the wonderful feature of tagging EC2 instances with key-value pairs to make the management of large numbers of VMs a bit easier. Is there some way to query these tags in the same way as some of the other user-set data? For example: $ curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone us-east-1d Is there some similar way to query the tags? Select the correct answer from above options

Answer 1

To retrieve your instance id use a combination of AWS metadata tool and the new Tag API to retrieve the tags for the instance. After you have installed ec2-metadata and ec2-describe-tags, use this example shell command to retrieve your current instances name. In this example, “Name=demo” is the tag you have to use. Assumes EC2_PRIVATE_KEY and EC2_CERT environment variables are set. ec2-describe-tags \ --filter "resource-type=instance" \ --filter "resource-id=$(ec2-metadata -i | cut -d ' ' -f2)" \ --filter "key=Name" | cut -f5 This returns demo.