Finding all Amazon AWS Instances That Do Not Have a Certain Tag

Question

I\'m trying to use the Amazon AWS Command Line Tools to find all instances that do not have a specified tag.

Finding all instances WITH a tag is simple enough, e.g.<

Answer 1

Since --filters parameter doesn't seem to support inverse filtering, here's my solution to this problem using --query parameter:

aws ec2 describe-instances \
--query 'Reservations[].Instances[?!contains(Tags[].Key, `Name`)][].InstanceId'

It looks at an array of tag keys for each instance and filters those instance that don't have Tag 'Name' in the array. Then flattens output to array of instance IDs.

• Advantage over some previous answers: no need for jq or other command to filter output.
• Disadvantage over true inverse filter: likely to be much slower over large number of instances.