How do I keep a table in one Word document that shows the details about AWS EC2 instances updated?

Question

I have an AWS account on which I have a few EC2 instances running. For documentation purposes, I have to maintain a Microsoft Word document where the list of such EC2 instances and its details are provided as a table.

As of now, I export the details from AWS console; clean them up; copy and paste one detail after another into the word document. Once I have prepared this document, any changes happening on the EC2 instances are not reflected in the document and the document becomes outdated.

Like how I can update a "Table of Contents" at my will, I should be able to update this table which will keep the data updated always. Is there any way to do this without using VBA macros in my Word document?

Answer 1

You can use an aws-cli ec2 describe-intances(take a look at the examples) with a proper combination of filters and queries based on your requirements, even use a tool like jq to filter and tweak it even more in case the default filters are not enough for you) and then save the output to a csv. Once you have the command ready to go and it satisfies the requirements, you could potentially create a scheduled task to run it every hour or so, depending on how often you want to update the file.