Query EC2 tags from within instance

The following bash script returns the Name of your current ec2 instance (the value of the "Name" tag). Modify TAG_NAME to your specific case.

TAG_NAME="Name"
INSTANCE_ID="`wget -qO- http://instance-data/latest/meta-data/instance-id`"
REGION="`wget -qO- http://instance-data/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone | sed -e 's:\([0-9][0-9]*\)[a-z]*\$:\\1:'`"
TAG_VALUE="`aws ec2 describe-tags --filters "Name=resource-id,Values=$INSTANCE_ID" "Name=key,Values=$TAG_NAME" --region $REGION --output=text | cut -f5`"

To install the aws cli

sudo apt-get install python-pip -y
sudo pip install awscli

In case you use IAM instead of explicit credentials, use these IAM permissions:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {    
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [ "ec2:DescribeTags"],
      "Resource": ["*"]
    }
  ]
}

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.

You can add this script to your cloud-init user data to download EC2 tags to a local file:

#!/bin/sh
INSTANCE_ID=`wget -qO- http://instance-data/latest/meta-data/instance-id`
REGION=`wget -qO- http://instance-data/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone | sed 's/.$//'`
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"/' > /etc/ec2-tags

You need the AWS CLI tools installed on your system: you can either install them with a packages section in a cloud-config file before the script, use an AMI that already includes them, or add an apt or yum command at the beginning of the script.

In order to access EC2 tags you need a policy like this one in your instance's IAM role:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "Stmt1409309287000",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "ec2:DescribeTags"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "*"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

The instance's EC2 tags will available in /etc/ec2-tags in this format:

FOO="Bar"
Name="EC2 tags with cloud-init"

You can include the file as-is in a shell script using . /etc/ec2-tags, for example:

#!/bin/sh
. /etc/ec2-tags
echo $Name

The tags are downloaded during instance initialization, so they will not reflect subsequent changes.

---

The script and IAM policy are based on itaifrenkel's answer.

Once you've got ec2-metadata and ec2-describe-tags installed (as mentioned in Ranieri's answer above), here's an example shell command to get the "name" of the current instance, assuming you have a "Name=Foo" tag on it.

Assumes EC2_PRIVATE_KEY and EC2_CERT environment variables are set.

ec2-describe-tags \
  --filter "resource-type=instance" \
  --filter "resource-id=$(ec2-metadata -i | cut -d ' ' -f2)" \
  --filter "key=Name" | cut -f5

This returns Foo.