Overview aws-vault is a tool for storing your AWS credentials in your system keychain instead of as a plain text file on-disk. Credentials and other secrets (including your various system passwords) are stored inside your system keychain. They are encrypted, and cannot easily be stolen by a rogue script or application. By keeping your AWS credentials in your system keychain, they are available to you when you are logged in, unavailable when you are logged out, and provide an important layer of security that the standard plain text storage method does not.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about code, so I thought I’d post this little AWS-related tip for OS X and Linux users. If you have the Unified AWS CLI Tools configured, you can add these functions to your Bash profile (typically either ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile) to enable you to SSH into an instance by “Name” tag, or simply lookup the IP address or DNS hostname. hostname_from_instance <instance-name> ip_from_instance <instance-name> ssh-aws <instance-name> Bash code function hostname_from_instance() { echo $(aws ec2 describe-instances --filters "{\"Name\":\"tag:Name\", \"Values\":[\"$1\"]}" --query='Reservations[0].