Cloudiquity » Instance information http://www.cloudiquity.com A blog about Cloud, Grid and HPC technologies Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:56:36 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Finding information about an Amazon EC2 instance http://www.cloudiquity.com/2009/02/finding-information-about-an-amazon-ec2-instance/ http://www.cloudiquity.com/2009/02/finding-information-about-an-amazon-ec2-instance/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:54:37 +0000 admin http://www.cloudiquity.com/?p=131 One thing hit me when I was working with EC2 and I wanted to find some information about the instance itself. This did not seem to be readily available and I spent a frustrating 45 minutes trying to get what I was looking for. Eventually I found a very easy way to get the amazon instance information using CURL. Enter the following command appended by the Amazon information you are looking for:

$ curl http://169.254.169.254/1.0/meta-data/

This command can be appended with:
ami-id
ami-launch-index
ami-manifest-path
hostname
instance-id
local-ipv4
public-keys/
reservation-id
security-groups

You can also pass data to the instance when you start it using EC2 tools  and retrieve the data within the instance using the above command. E.g if you started the instance using the command
ec2-run-instances ami-3abe5953 -d “Some data I need”

In the instance
$ curl http://169.254.169.254/1.0/user-data
will return
Some data I need

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