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"?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.