Amazon Web Services (AWS) has updated its search capabilities on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). According to a blog post by Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for the public cloud services provider, the new feature enables search and filtering using tags and attributes.

The new feature is available to EC2 customers via the AWS Management Console and provides partners and customers with the ability to find instances by using tags and attribute filters. Advanced search options are also available, and include inverse search, partial search and regular expressions.

“Regardless of the manner in which you launch them, you probably want to track the role (development, test, production, and so forth) internal owner, and other attributes of each instance. This becomes especially important as your fleet grows to hundreds or thousands of instances,” wrote Barr.

Amazon has supported EC2 tagging for quite some time, he noted, but prior to this announcement, users could only sort tags by like-tagged instances, essentially placing them into groups. The new tag searchability feature goes a step further.

“With today’s launch, you can use the tags that you assign, along with the instance attributes, to locate the instance or instances that you are looking for,” Barr wrote.

The enhanced tagging and search features should make it easier for Amazon EC2 users to quickly find instances, saving them time—particularly if they have a lot of instances being launched and maintained. As before, users can tag the instances with as many as 10 tags.

So far, this search feature only works for EC2 instances, but Barr hinted of an expansion of the feature to include other EC2 resources “before too long.”