How do you distinguish your EC2 instances?

Question

The ec2-describe-instances command is not very helpful in distinguishing the instances. Are there command line tools that give a better overview?

Perhaps somewhat like http://github.com/newbamboo/manec2 but with support for different regions etc.

Answer 1

You can use security group to identify your instance. See http://www.shlomoswidler.com/2009/06/tagging-ec2-instances-using-security_30.html

You can add an empty security_group to each instance to be able to communicate with each other.

I'm using http://github.com/cocoy/mr.awsome to provision and name instance via security groups. This way I can identify each instance whether I'm using Elasticfox, AWS console, or the same tool mr.awsome.

See also: http://www.capsunlock.net/2010/05/five-easy-steps-to-tag-ec2-instance-using-mr-awsome.html

Cheers,

Rodney

http://www.capunlock.net

Answer 2

This isn't a command-line solution, and it's far from perfect, but my company currently maintains a shared Word document in a Dropbox folder that maintains the role/name -> instance id mapping for all of our active instances.

Using a Word document also allows us to keep track of some more information that is nice to have available at a glance:

• The "environment" the instance is a part of.
• The RDP shortcut to the instance for simple access.
• The AMI the instance was launched from.
• Any additional attached volumes.
• The region the instance is in.
• etc.

Answer 3

I think Rodney's method of using securty groups is the most comprehensive, but if you just want a way to assign a free-form tag to your instances, you can do that if you set up a free account at RightScale and use it to launch your instances. Warning - you'll have to put up with occasional emails from RightScale asking if you want to use their paid services.

Answer 4

Yes I use separate security groups for separate servers to identify them. I use the same security group if it is a cluster of identical instances. I do this in my open source admin tool at http://www.elastdream.com