How can you find out the OS running on an EC2 instance using AWS CLI.
The ec2 describe-instance command spits out a lot of information , but there is nothing indicating the OS .
I also tried ec2 describe-images on a specific image. Again, there doesn't seem to be any indication of OS.
Help..?
Here's a quick way to list the Platform field, which at least distinguishes between Windows and Linux:
aws ec2 describe-instances --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId,Platform]' --output text i-78b4ef47 windows i-b8ae3386 windows i-9d3611a2 None i-1c57c651 windows i-a241ec91 None i-7d26b630 None Try this command:
aws ec2 describe-images --image-ids $(aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-ids i-xxxxxxxxxxxxx --query 'Reservations[0].Instances[0].ImageId' --output text) --query 'Images[0].Name' $() part gets the ImageId using InstanceId.
You can't query the specific OS of the instance from the AWS cli but you can query the AMI that the instance is based off of. Also, you can't get an 'OS' attribute but you can get the Description or Name of the AMI, so if you create your AMIs with a meaningful description you can make it work.
$ aws ec2 describe-images --image-ids "ami-xxxxxxxx" { "Images": [ { "VirtualizationType": "paravirtual", "Name": "amazon-linux-20130509", "Tags": [ { "Value": "amazon-linux-20130509", "Key": "Name" } ], "Hypervisor": "xen", "ImageId": "ami-xxxxxxxx", "RootDeviceType": "ebs", "State": "available", "BlockDeviceMappings": [ { "DeviceName": "/dev/sda1", "Ebs": { "DeleteOnTermination": true, "SnapshotId": "snap-xxxxxxxx", "VolumeSize": 100, "VolumeType": "standard" } } ], "Architecture": "x86_64", "ImageLocation": "123456789012/amazon-linux-20130509", "KernelId": "aki-fc37bacc", "OwnerId": "123456789012", "RootDeviceName": "/dev/sda1", "Public": false, "ImageType": "machine", "Description": "Amazon Linux" } ] } If you want to get more detailed you can always write your own script to ssh into the machines and run cat /etc/issue in each one of them.