Find region from within an EC2 instance

Question

Is there a way to look up the region of an instance from within the instance?

I\'m looking for something similar to the method of finding the instance id.

Answer 1

This is the cleanest solution I found:

curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/dynamic/instance-identity/document |sed -n 's/  "region" : "\(.*\)"/\1/p'

E.g.,

export REGION=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/dynamic/instance-identity/document |sed -n 's/  "region" : "\(.*\)"/\1/p')

• Doesn't make an API call, uses EC2 instance meta-data
• Only uses curl, and basic sed, so no dependencies on SDKs or tools not likely to be installed.
• Doesn't attempt to parse the Availability Zone name, so no worries if AWS changes AZ/Region name format