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

A variation on some of the answers above but this is how I got the value of a specific tag from the user-data script on an instance

REGION=$(curl http://instance-data/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone | sed 's/.$//')

INSTANCE_ID=$(curl -s http://instance-data/latest/meta-data/instance-id)

TAG_VALUE=$(aws ec2 describe-tags --region $REGION --filters "Name=resource-id,Values=$INSTANCE_ID" "Name=key,Values=''" | jq -r '.Tags[].Value')