Specifying an instance by tag

[aidansteele]

Right now we just support ssh user@<instance-id>. Perhaps people would want to use ssh user@<instance name> or other such tags. How should we do this? A few questions to ponder:

• Should we support only the Name tag?
• Should we support other tags?
• Should we support only one tag or could it be ssh user@tag=val?
• Is the above horrific?!
• How should we distinguish between EC2 instances and hostnames on the local network?
• What about tag values with spaces in them?

This is also relevant to #2 as perhaps the jumphost instance is e.g. named sshjump in each region.

[jdub]

Good call. Building in clever stuff like tag-based lookups would be sweet. (We have an internal tool that does this.)

I have public host names for my instances that I'd prefer to use instead of the instance ID, for which a host name glob would work. You could support VPC host names by default, e.g. *.compute.internal.