This is the beginning of hopefully many new posts with golang snippets from [my blog](http://www.heystephenwood.com/). List all of your running (or pending) EC2 instances with Amazon's golang sdk.

For a list of filters or instance attributes consult the [official documentation](http://godoc.org/github.com/awslabs/aws-sdk-go/gen/ec2#Instance).

```go
package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"github.com/awslabs/aws-sdk-go/aws"
	"github.com/awslabs/aws-sdk-go/gen/ec2"
	"os"
)

func check(e error) {

	if e != nil {
		panic(e)
	}
}

func main() {

	aws_user := os.Getenv("AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID")
	aws_pass := os.Getenv("AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY")

	creds := aws.Creds(aws_user, aws_pass, "")
	client := ec2.New(creds, "us-west-1", nil)

	// Only grab instances that are running or just started
	filters := []ec2.Filter{
		ec2.Filter{
			aws.String("instance-state-name"),
			[]string{"running", "pending"},
		},
	}
	request := ec2.DescribeInstancesRequest{Filters: filters}
	result, err := client.DescribeInstances(&request)
	check(err)

	for _, reservation := range result.Reservations {
		for _, instance := range reservation.Instances {
			fmt.Println(*instance.InstanceID)
		}
	}
}
```