Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service

You can use the AWS SDK for Go V2 to access the Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service. The feature/ec2/imds Go package provides a Client type that can be used to access the Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service. The Client and associated operations can be used similar to the other AWS service clients provided by the SDK. To learn more information on how to configure the SDK, and use service clients see Configuring the SDK and Using AWS Services.

The client can help you easily retrieve information about instances on which your applications run, such as its AWS Region or local IP address. Typically, you must create and submit HTTP requests to retrieve instance metadata. Instead, create an imds.Client to access the Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service using a programmatic client like other AWS Services.

For example to construct a client:

import "context"
import "github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/config"
import "github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/feature/ec2/imds"

// ...

cfg, err := config.LoadDefaultConfig(context.TODO())
if err != nil {
	log.Printf("error: %v", err)
	return
}

client := imds.NewFromConfig(cfg)

Then use the service client to retrieve information from a metadata category such as local-ipv4 (the private IP address of the instance).

localip, err := client.GetMetadata(context.TODO(), &imds.GetMetadataInput{
	Path: "local-ipv4",
})
if err != nil {
    log.Printf("Unable to retrieve the private IP address from the EC2 instance: %s\n", err)
    return
}

fmt.Printf("local-ip: %v\n", localip)

For a list of all metadata categories, see Instance Metadata Categories in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Retrieving an Instance’s Region

There’s no instance metadata category that returns only the Region of an instance. Instead, use the included Region method to easily return an instance’s Region.

response, err := client.GetRegion(context.TODO(), &imds.GetRegionInput{})
if err != nil {
    log.Printf("Unable to retrieve the region from the EC2 instance %v\n", err)
}

fmt.Printf("region: %v\n", response.Region)

For more information about the EC2 metadata utility, see the feature/ec2/imds package in the AWS SDK for Go V2 API Reference.