Tag Archives: tagging instances

Amazon Resource Tagging

After several years of waiting, Amazon now has new feature to tag instances, volumes, and other resources. Need to check it out? Amazon EC2 Resource Tagging

Simple test with Tagging an EC2 instance and an EBS volume.

1. Download the latest API tools here

2. In your terminal update the variable EC2_HOME and PATH:

 shell_prompt$ export EC2_HOME=/Applications/ec2/ec2-api-tools-1.3-57419
 shell_prompt$ export PATH=$EC2_HOME/bin:$PATH
 shell_prompt$ ec2_version 
 1.3-57419 2010-08-31

3. Now for the tagging(just replace the instance-id and volume-id):

shell_prompt$ ec2-create-tags i-12345678 vol-12345678 -t webserver=host2
TAG	instance	 i-12345678	webserver	host2
TAG	volume	vol-12345678	webserver	host2

shell_prompt$ ec2-describe-tags
TAG	volume	vol-12345678	webserver	host2
TAG	instance	 i-12345678	webserver	host2

I’m now looking for a way to tag my current instances probably by writing a script.
Happy tagging.

Five Easy Steps to Tag EC2 Instance Using mr.awsome

Are you running 10,30 or 100 instances in your single EC2 Account? How do you identify each one?

There have been lot of questions on how to tag and manage a bunch of EC2 instances. To tell you I’ve been into your situation, after working with several EC2 clients. What a pain to keep track which instance is which.

Existing posts about How-are-admins-managing-their-ec2-ebss-and-snapshots and answers like Tagging-ec2-instances-using-security.

But in some cases, placing a set of instances into a set of groups, would possibly create or block access to the other instances using the same group when trying to change a security settings.

Matt Juszczak describe an example of this problem in his blog here.

Proposed Solution: Set a unique security group for an instance.

PROS:
1. It solves the tagging of each instance
2. Eliminates the possible problem describe above since the current instance is only affected when you try to change it’s security settings.

CONS:
1. Unfortunately, you have to define individual group for each of the instance and that is extra work.
2. Existing instances (especially production instances) cannot make use of this solution unless by launching the production image and remapping Elastic IP.

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