Check if Ansible playbook is running on an EC2 instance

(Last modified on )
#ansible #ec2

In one of my Ansible playbooks I needed to only execute a couple of tasks if they were running on an EC2 instance.

The way I solved this was by checking the ansible_bios_version fact. For example:

- debug:
    msg: "This is an EC2 instance"
  when: "'amazon' in ansible_bios_version"

This is probably not perfect, but at least it worked for me at the moment.

Note that the day after I needed this, Jeff Geerling posted an alternative way to check if you are in AWS.