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

For those crazy enough to use Fish shell on EC2, here's a handy snippet for your /home/ec2-user/.config/fish/config.fish. The hostdata command now will list all your tags as well as the public IP and hostname.

set -x INSTANCE_ID (wget -qO- http://instance-data/latest/meta-data/instance-id)
set -x REGION (wget -qO- http://instance-data/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone | sed 's/.$//')

function hostdata
    aws ec2 describe-tags --region $REGION --filter "Name=resource-id,Values=$INSTANCE_ID" --output=text | sed -r 's/TAGS\t(.*)\t.*\t.*\t(.*)/\1="\2"/'
    ec2-metadata | grep public-hostname
    ec2-metadata | grep public-ipv4
end