If you need to get the IAM Role information from the attached EC2 role directly, you can do the following:

IAM_ROLE=$(curl -s 169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/iam/info | \
  jq -r '.InstanceProfileArn' | cut -d'/' -f2)

This queries the EC2 instance metadata service to get the IAM role name attached to the instance you’re running on. I use this in bootstrap scripts that need to know their own role for logging or conditional logic.

The 169.254.169.254 address is the instance metadata endpoint — it’s only accessible from within the EC2 instance itself. If you’re on IMDSv2 (which AWS recommends), you’ll need to fetch a session token first with a PUT request before the GET will work. The jq and cut combo extracts just the role name from the full ARN.