Is it possible to get platform and OS information from EC2 instances

Question

I want to extract some information from EC2 instances. I want to know if it's possible to get the type of operating system and the version running on an EC2 instance. 

I will like to know if this is possible using the SDK. I tried with Python SDK Boto3 but no results.

Answer 1

Yes it is possible to get the information you are looking for just follow the steps below:-

Select your instance 

Go to Action

Click on Instance setting 

Click on Get instance screenshot.

Once you refresh the Screenshot it will then show you the actual OS Information.

Hope this helps.

Comments

But I think @datageek is asking how to get those details from the CLI...

@datageek, is there any reason why you want to see it only from CLI? Its not like you won't have access to the AWS dashboard anyway...

Answer 2

Yes, I tried it using Python SDK Boto3 too. No results. Neither with Amazon CLI. 

Then I found out AWS SDK and CLI can help you get information that is available at the hypervisor level. But what we are asking is available inside the VM not at hypervisor. With CLI the closes you can get is to find out the AMI image-id for each instance.

Answer 3

Yes ,
Due to security and privacy policies AWS does not have access to customers instance in any way, therefore it is not possible for AWS to get operating system information from within the instance and display it in console via API's
Collect all the image information of that particular user account. then map that image id with that aws instance's image id . So you can get OS related information as desc or image name .

Comments

That totally makes sense. It would be nice if you shared some documentation proving this point. Thank you!