AWS metadata: Check if EC2 instance is spot?

Question

There's a AWS metadata service which provides some information about the EC2 instance that issues a request to http://169.254.169.254/. I'm wondering if there's a way to know from that metadata if the instance is "Spot" or "On Demand"?

Matt Houser · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-30T13:26:17.157

11

The information is not available inside the metadata.

However, you can get the instance ID from the metadata, then call ec2-describe-instances to get instance information about your instance. Inside that instance description is the spot instance request ID. If blank, then it's not a spot instance, otherwise, it's a spot instance.

edited Aug 30 '12 at 13:26

answered Aug 29 '12 at 00:37

Matt Houser

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Nice! Thanks, I've been looking for this for a while and must have overlooked it when looking at the instance data. – SaxDaddy Dec 26 '15 at 09:32
I see no key called 'spot instance request ID' in the json printed. I did: `aws ec2 describe-instances` and I am using AWS CLI 2. – Naveen Reddy Marthala Nov 05 '20 at 09:56

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 28 '12 at 20:08

I don't believe they have this information in the metadata.

You could assign a different profile for instances you launch as spot instances and use the profile name to determine what type of instance it is. If that doesn't seem like a clean or viable solution you can always grab the instance-id from the meta data then run the command ec2-describe-spot-instance-requests --filter instance-id=<instanceid> if the command returns empty than the instance is not a spot instance, if the command returns with data then it's a spot instance.

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered May 03 '19 at 18:57

I know this is super old but if anyone wants a one liner:

aws ec2 describe-spot-instance-requests \
  --filters Name=instance-id,Values="$(wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id)" \
  --region us-east-1 | \
  jq -r '.SpotInstanceRequests | if length > 0 then "spot" else "normal" end'

Adjust --region accordingly

https://gist.github.com/urjitbhatia/c5af8a3d53661cb3d4e896feae23fc1d

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 18 '19 at 14:22

A little improved version of that of @urjit:

aws ec2 describe-spot-instance-requests \
  --filters Name=instance-id,Values="$(wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id)" \
  --region "$(wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone | sed 's/.$//')" | \
  jq -r '.SpotInstanceRequests | if length > 0 then "Ec2Spot" else "OnDemand" end'

AWS metadata: Check if EC2 instance is spot?

4 Answers4