EC2 Linux Server Metadata

Tutorial blog to access instance metadata from a running instance

Learning Objective:

Learn to access instance metadata from a running instance using Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2)

Access instance metadata from a running instance using IMDSv2

Step 1: Provision a Linux instance using Amazon Linux 2023 AMI.

You may refer to our tutorial blog for step-by-step instructions to create & connect to the EC2 instance.

Step 2: Connect to the instance using EC2 instance connect.

Once you are connected to the instance your command prompt should display similar to the image below.

Step 3: To retrieve metadata run the following command.

TOKEN=`curl -X PUT "http://169.254.169.254/latest/api/token" -H "X-aws-ec2-metadata-token-ttl-seconds: 21600"` && curl -H "X-aws-ec2-metadata-token: $TOKEN" -v http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/

Step 4: To retrievethe value of instance id run following command

TOKEN=`curl -X PUT "http://169.254.169.254/latest/api/token" -H "X-aws-ec2-metadata-token-ttl-seconds: 21600"` && curl -H "X-aws-ec2-metadata-token: $TOKEN" -v http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id/

Similarly you can retrieve rest of the metadata for the instance.

Step 5: Close the SSH session and terminate the instance.

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