Determine the supported boot modes of an instance type

You can use the AWS CLI to determine the supported boot modes of an instance type.

To determine the supported boot modes of an instance type

Use the describe-instance-types command to determine the supported boot modes of an instance type. By including the --query parameter, you can filter the output. In this example, the output is filtered to return only the supported boot modes.

The following example shows that m5.2xlarge supports both UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes.

aws ec2 describe-instance-types --region us-east-1 --instance-types m5.2xlarge --query "InstanceTypes[*].SupportedBootModes"

Expected output

[
    [
        "legacy-bios",
        "uefi"
    ]
]

The following example shows that t2.xlarge supports only Legacy BIOS.

aws ec2 --region us-east-1 describe-instance-types --instance-types t2.xlarge --query "InstanceTypes[*].SupportedBootModes"

Expected output

[
    [
        "legacy-bios"
    ]
]