How to detect Azure/Amazon VM

Question

Is there any way to detect, in general, if your code is executing on an Azure or Amazon virtual machine. I am not referring to some sort of web or worker role in particular, I mean given any executable, is there anything that resolves that machine to a cloud VM - for example under Azure there is no domain so i cannot simply rely on a domain name.

Answer 1

AWS

If your guest has networking up then you can probe the instance metadata by accessing http://169.254.169.254

For example:

$ curl http://169.254.169.254/1.0/meta-data/instance-id
i-87dc2f76

However, hitting the network is fairly heavy-weight.

On AWS you can also check by looking at dmidecode:

$ /usr/sbin/dmidecode -s bios-version | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]" | grep -q "amazon"

dmidecode is light-weight since it only hits the memory of the guest OS. However, as pointed out in previous answers it is dependent on Amazon continuing to include the word "amazon" in their version strings.

Azure

On Azure, you can detect the hypervisor details but this doesn't allow you to discriminate between Azure and HyperV. Depending on your scenario this might not be necessary.

To detect Azure/HyperV using dmidecode check the following strings:

$ /usr/sbin/dmidecode -s system-manufacturer | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]" | grep -q "microsoft corporation"

$ /usr/sbin/dmidecode -s system-product-name | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]" | grep -q "virtual machine"