ec2-describe-instance-status Client.InvalidInstanceID.NotFound but I KNOW instance exists

Question

I have setup a few of the amazon AWS CLI tools (EC2, Auto Scaling, MOnitoring and ELB). The tools are setup correctly and work perfectly. My environment vars are all set, the relevant ones to this Q being:

export EC2_REGION=eu-west-1 export EC2_URL=https://ec2.$EC2_REGION.amazonaws.com export AWS_ELB_URL=https://elasticloadbalancing.$EC2_REGION.amazonaws.com 

When I run ec2-describe-instance-status i-XXXXXXXX for ANY of my instances, I get:

Client.InvalidInstanceID.NotFound: The instance ID 'i-XXXXXXXX' does not exist 

I KNOW the instance ID exists, I copied it out of the AWS web console, and it is in the eu-west-1 region, and my env vars are set to this region.

For the life of me I can't figure out why it will not find my instances. Is there anything glaringly obvious that I am doing incorrectly?

UPDATE: recreating x509 cert/pk solved this... for some reason.

Answer 1

I had the same problem. It was because I wasn't defining a region for my commands. I assumed it would list all instances across all regions but it defaults to us-west-1 and I don't have any instances there.

To describe my machines in Ireland I use the following:

ec2-describe-instances --region eu-west-1
NB: I'm defining my AWS access key and secret elsewhere.

To avoid this problem going forward, I've now set my region via an environment variable on my linux and windows machines: EC2_URL=https://ec2.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com so that I don't have to be explicit on the command line.

Update May 2014 You can also set the region by adding the following lines to the ~/.aws/config file in your home folder (not tested on Windows). This is my preferred method now, especially on my VM's and containers:

[default] region = eu-west-1 

For more information see the offical docs here.

Update May 2021 Since I work across so many regions now I use Implicit and ephemeral environment variables to define my region for that command and NOT have a default in my .aws/config which can be dangerous. This also makes bash scripting easier as I can define it for the whole script/utility. It's a tiny bit more typing but far safer, more flexible and transparent e.g.:

AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=eu-central-1 aws ec2 describe-instances  # or for a script/utility AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1 ./tagInstances.sh 

Answer 2

Weird issue - as usual when encountering something weird in software development, one should first question the assumptions:

I KNOW the instance ID exists, I copied it out of the AWS web console, and it is in the eu-west-1 region, and my env vars are set to this region.

So the instance ID stems from a different environment than the one you want to use it in - I would try to derive the instance ID via the same environment instead, i.e.:

ec2-describe-instances 

I venture the guess that the list won't return the instances you are expecting. This would indicate that you are either using AWS credentials that belong to another account or that these credentials do not have the required Amazon EC2 read permissions assigned via IAM policies for example.