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 to query these tags in the same way as some of the other user-set data? For example:

$ wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone
us-east-1d

Is there some similar way to query the tags?

Answer 1

You can use a combination of the AWS metadata tool (to retrieve your instance ID) and the new Tag API to retrieve the tags for the current instance.