Query EC2 tags from within instance

Question

Amazon recently added the wonderful feature of tagging EC2 instances with key-value pairs to make management of large numbers of VMs a bit easier.

Is there some way

Answer 1

Once you've got ec2-metadata and ec2-describe-tags installed (as mentioned in Ranieri's answer above), here's an example shell command to get the "name" of the current instance, assuming you have a "Name=Foo" tag on it.

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 Foo.