AWS RDS CLI – DB Instances Not Listed Issue

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I've created an IAM user (CLI only) with AmazonRDSReadOnlyAccess permissions. Now every time I try to list my db instances I get an empty JSON object, even though I have one active RDS instance:

aws rds describe-db-instances
{
    "DBInstances": []
}

Also I tried to specify my instance id (the instance identifier does exist for sure):

aws rds describe-db-instances --db-instance-identifier mydb
An error occurred (DBInstanceNotFound) when calling the \
DescribeDBInstances operation: DBInstance vipbilet-db not found.

What am I doing wrong here?

Best Answer

Most likely you’re querying a wrong region. Try aws --region us-east-1 rds describe-db-instances. Replace us-east-1 with the region where you have your instance.

Related Solutions

AWS RDS CLI: AccessDenied on CreateDBSnapshot

It is indeed strange, but it appears that the CreateDBSnapshot permission also has to be assigned to the destination snapshot.

This policy works:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "Stmtxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "rds:CreateDBSnapshot"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:rds:eu-west-1:xxxxxxxxxxxxxx:db:my-database",
                "arn:aws:rds:eu-west-1:xxxxxxxxxxxxxx:snapshot:*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Command to list AWS instances that results in short output

Yes, via the --query option.

This option allows you to filter down and return specific elements from the structure. There is a special wildcard [*] notation that allows you to iterate over lists of objects; we'll use this to iterate over the list of EC2 instances and return your desired values.

Retrieving InstanceID, Instance Tag Name as JSON:

aws ec2 describe-instances --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId, Tags[?Key==`Name`].Value | [0]]'

[
    [
        [
            "i-abcd1234",
            "MyFirstInstance"
        ]
    ],
    [
        [
            "i-efgh5678",
            "MySecondInstance"
        ]
    ]
]

Retrieving InstanceID, Instance Tag Name as Text:

If you don't want to work with json, you can also add the --output option to output text:

aws ec2 describe-instances --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId, Tags[?Key==`Name`].Value | [0]]' --output text

i-abcd1234      MyFirstInstance
i-efgh5678      MySecondInstance

Best Answer

Related Solutions

AWS RDS CLI: AccessDenied on CreateDBSnapshot

Command to list AWS instances that results in short output

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