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

If you are not in the default availability zone the results from overthink would return empty.

ec2-describe-tags \
   --region \
     $(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone  | sed -e "s/.$//") \
   --filter \
     resource-id=$(curl --silent http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id)

If you want to add a filter to get a specific tag (elasticbeanstalk:environment-name in my case) then you can do this.

ec2-describe-tags \
   --region \
     $(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone  | sed -e "s/.$//") \
   --filter \
     resource-id=$(curl --silent http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id) \
   --filter \
     key=elasticbeanstalk:environment-name | cut -f5

And to get only the value for the tag that I filtered on, we pipe to cut and get the fifth field.

ec2-describe-tags \
  --region \
    $(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone  | sed -e "s/.$//") \
  --filter \
    resource-id=$(curl --silent http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id) \
  --filter \
    key=elasticbeanstalk:environment-name | cut -f5