In v1 and in v2 we have user data in the file system. In v2.1 we would be moving to S3. In the mean time the user data has to be backed up. AWS Lambda is great solution for this but the issue is it is not available in us-west-1 (sad) where our production is.
The next option was come up with a cli script that would use aws tags to backup volumes that have tag name as 'tag-key' and value as 'backup'.
for i in `aws ec2 describe-volumes --filters Name=tag-key,Values="tag-key" Name=tag-value,Values="backup*" --query 'Volumes[*].{ID:VolumeId}' --output text \